For instance, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology established that Flash creates a dedicated communication channel to the cybercriminal’s special server, which captures the client’s real IP address, and totally discredits the victim. The leaked NSA documents, including a review of how Tor users can be de-anonymized (Source: As well as these pseudo-official documents, the Tor community is also aware of other more interesting and ingenuous attacks on the client side. This enables surveillance over only a very narrow spectrum of users. Exploits have a very short life cycle, so at a specific moment of time there are different versions of the browser, some containing a specific vulnerability and other not.
However, as the NSA reports in its presentation, using vulnerability exploitation tools does not allow permanent surveillance over Darknet users. The leaked NSA documents tell us that intelligence services have no qualms about using exploits to Firefox, which was the basis for Tor Browser. All of them can be conditionally divided into two groups: attacks on the client’s side (the browser), and attacks on the connection. The history of the Tor Darknet has seen many attempts – theoretical and practical – to identify anonymous users. In this research, we will present practical examples to demonstrate how Tor users may lose their anonymity and will draw conclusions from those examples. This may mean that the implementation of the Tor Darknet contains some vulnerabilities and/or configuration defects that make it possible to unmask any Tor user.
Intelligence services have not disclosed any technical details of how they detained cybercriminals who created Tor sites to distribute illegal goods in particular, they are not giving any clues how they identify cybercriminals who act anonymously.
However, further developments, such as the detention of the maker of the Silk Road site, have conclusively demonstrated that these businesses were less anonymous than most assumed. Many users have jumped at this chance – some did so to protect themselves or out of curiosity, while others developed a false sense of impunity, and saw an opportunity to do clandestine business anonymously: selling banned goods, distributing illegal content, etc. Unlike conventional World Wide Web technologies, the Tor Darknet onion routing technologies give users a real chance to remain anonymous.
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