Privacy

31238 readers

747 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

162

Is TOR compromised? (arstechnica.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by Artemis_Mystique@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

69 comments fedilink hide all child comments

All the recent dark net arrests seem to be pretty vague on how the big bad was caught (except the IM admin's silly opsec errors) In the article they say he clicked on a honeypot link, but how was his ip or any other identifier identified, why didnt tor protect him.

Obviously this guy in question was a pedophile and an active danger, but recently in my country a state passed a law that can get you arrested if you post anything the government doesnt like, so these tools are important and need to be bulletproof.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Artemis_Mystique@lemmy.ml 10 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Does Tor have no protection against such a simple attack? I always thought any clearnet address i type in the browser (along with the dns query) hops 3 times.

[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

The Tor network cannot protect against that, because the attack circumvents it. Certain tools, like the Tor browser, do have protection against it (as much as they can) when you use them correctly, but they cannot keep users from inadvertently opening a link in some other tool. Nor can they protect against other software on a user's device, like a spyware keyboard or the OS provider working with law enforcement.

[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It's unlikely that the Tor browser is configured as the default browser, so when you click the link, it will open in something else

[–] Artemis_Mystique@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 weeks ago

Then doesn't that mean that the guy was somehow shortlisted and handpicked to be served that honeypot link?

[–] orcrist@lemm.ee 2 points 2 weeks ago

You can do DNS in multiple ways. The question is what you try to do, or what your software tries to do.

[–] gencha@lemm.ee 1 points 2 weeks ago

I can't answer this with confidence, but I was thinking the link in the email opened in the default browser, which wasn't Tor in their case. Or something in the email client perhaps. Ultimately, I have no idea what happened and I was just speculating