(Disclosure: The Tor Project, which helps develop Tor and Tor Browser, has received money from the Freedom of the Press Foundation, where I sit on the board. Even someone monitoring your network traffic - having cracked your wifi, for example - will have no idea what sites you’re visiting.
With Tor, all a website knows is that you’re some anonymous Tor user. This prevents the websites you visit from knowing your real IP address, information that can be used to pinpoint your location and identity. When you use Tor Browser, you no longer visit websites directly but instead through a network of Tor nodes. Tor is not just a network of computers, it’s also the open-source software that runs that network, helping people access the internet anonymously. But the incident serves as a reminder of the government’s strong interest in bypassing the protections Tor offers - and of how vulnerable computer users can be even when using proven and secure privacy systems. It’s impossible for any security software, including Tor Browser, to continue to protect someone after their computer has been hacked. The Tor Browser monitoring capability did not represent a breach of the Tor network, which bounces web traffic around the world to hide its destination. Hacking Team, at the FBI’s request, had just added the ability to monitor ostensibly anonymous Tor Browser traffic from a target infected with Hacking Team malware. Thank you.” (An April 2013 email laments Lal’s departure from the FBI.) Infect the target with an agent with Hacking Team’s support staff responded the next day, writing, “From our understanding the tbb is just a customized Firefox, we will look at it for future releases.“ Less than two weeks later they told Lal that his requested feature was in the works: “Dear Client, next RCS release (8.2.0) will capture URL from the TOR browser. He then outlined the steps someone might take to reproduce the problem he encountered with Hacking Team spyware:ĭownload TOR browser bundle. Lal described his problem succinctly, complaining on Hacking Team’s customer website that the company’s “URL collector does not collect web traffic on TOR browser,” according to a large trove of emails and other documents recently obtained by one or more computer hackers. It reported what addresses his target visited in normal web browsers, but not when his target used Tor Browser, software designed to mask sensitive web surfing. Lal needed help he had used Hacking Team software to break into and monitor an investigative target’s computer, but the monitoring wasn’t working as well as Lal expected. In July of 2012, FBI contractor Pradeep Lal contacted the customer support department of the Italian company Hacking Team, a maker of spyware for law enforcement and intelligence agencies worldwide.
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