Security Company Attributes Tor Traffic Surge To Botnet

hypnosec writes "A cyber defense and IT security company has claimed that the reason behind recent surge in number of clients connecting to Tor is in fact a relatively unknown botnet and not NSA or genuine adoption of Tor. In late August there was a huge increase in Tor network traffic and number of clients connecting to the Tor network. As of this writing number of connections has quadrupled with over 2,500,000 clients connecting to the network. According to Fox-it, the surge in traffic is because of a botnet dubbed 'Mevade.A,' which is known to have Tor connectivity features. The company noted that the botnet may have links to a previously detected botnet dubbed 'Sefnit,' which also featured Tor connectivity. Fox-it claimed that they have found "references that the malware is internally known as SBC to its operators.""

I, for one, welcome our bot overlords

[stewsters]

The more peers and traffic, the better anonymity. If some of those peers are grandmas with 50 toolbars rather than paranoid crypto-nerds, we are better off.

Re:I, for one, welcome our bot overlords

[Anonymous Coward]

Until your going through mostly peers that are controlled by one entity (botnet herder), which allows them to conduct various attacks against tor's anonymity, not to mention sniffing data from compromised exit nodes, increasing the public perception that tor is for "bad stuff", etc.