By setting up honeypots in the Tor network, Guevara Noubir, a professor from the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University, and Amirali Sanatinia, a PhD candidate also from Northeastern, discovered an armada of Tor hidden service directories that are spying on dark web sites. These modified nodes allow whoever is behind them—perhaps law enforcement, hackers or other researchers—to find the addresses of sites that are supposed to be secret. The pair will be presenting their research at the Def Con hacking conference in August.
People who want to hunt out dark web sites “go through the code and do the modifications to be able to log the .onions, and then visit them,” Noubir told Motherboard in a phone call.
Cops could do this to find new child pornography sites, or hackers to hunt fresh targets. Noubir pointed out that there are plenty of companies that sell dark web intelligence too, so perhaps they could be setting up HSDirs.
The Tor network is amongst the most secure ways of browsing the Internet anonymously. But this research demonstrates that using the service doesn’t guarantee your anonymity.
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