Cybercrooks Increasingly Use Tor Network To Control Botnets

alphadogg writes "Malware writers are increasingly considering the Tor anonymity network as an option for hiding the real location of their command-and-control servers, according to researchers from security firm ESET. The researchers recently came across two botnet-type malware programs that use C&C servers operating as Tor 'hidden services.' The Tor Hidden Service protocol allows users to set up services — usually Web servers — that can only be accessed from within the Tor network through a random-looking hostname that ends in the .onion pseudo domain extension. The traffic between a Tor client and a Tor hidden service is encrypted and is randomly routed through a series of computers participating in the network and acting as relays."

Re:I guess I don't know how these things work

[houstonbofh]

No need... Cheap server hosting with little tracking was plentiful. Now, not so much... You see, as they develop new methods, lots of people study and find ways to defeat those methods. So in a small ammount of time, there will be many hackers finding a way to shatter annonomity in TOR. The NSA could not have planned it better.

Re:I guess I don't know how these things work

[stewsters]

Its pretty easy to take away the anonymity of tor if you could hypothetically record all traffic to and from each computer in the network. You can then see Alice send the message to Carlos who then forwarded it to Bob. Luckily in the US no one is recording every encrypted message you send... oh shit.

The only way to protect yourself would to use garlic routing [wikipedia.org] and make sure you send a lot of traffic. Turn your bandwidth up. To improve this, you need to create a widely used sharing client for your network to get as many others to create decoy traffic as you can.

Re:What is wrong with being anonymous?

[lgw]

The main use of TOR seems to be buying drugs. Clearly he's a drug-dealer terrorist pedo! And a hacker.

Back when /. was young and dinosaurs walked the earth, some pundit predicted the "four horsemen of the internet apocalypse": terrorists, pedos, drug dealers, and hackers. Every freedom the internet provided would be removed over time because for each freedom the public could be sufficiently scared by one of the four horsemen.

Sadly that was overly optimistic, having underestimated the power of the copyright lobby.