MESSAGE
| DATE | 2015-06-18 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] Tor security
|
Anyone understand this? How can they unravel tor and what messages
STORE the route paths aside from email?
Baseball
Hacking Inquiry Finds a Trail Despite Efforts to Cover It Up
By JAMES GLANZ
JUNE
17, 2015
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The F.B.I.’s route to the St. Louis Cardinals
’
front office in pursuit of an apparent hacker, or hackers, involved a
trip through a shrouded corner of the Internet.
The website Deadspin pointed out last June
that internal documents from the Houston Astros had been posted
anonymously on a site called Anonbin. Alarmed, the Major League Baseball
commissioner’s office notified law enforcement officials. From the
Anonbin posting, those officials worked backward to find the
perpetrator, who had tried to leave no tracks.
The person or people who penetrated the Astros’ network apparently used
a network of servers called Tor to hide the source of the documents that
found their way to the site.
Continue reading the main story
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“Tor is among the best anonymizing services out there, but it is not a
silver bullet,” said Sascha Meinrath, director of X-Lab, a technology
policy organization in Washington. Tor is most effective in the hands of
an experienced hacker, Mr. Meinrath said. The hacking, though, seems to
have left traces somewhere in the welter of Tor servers.
“What this tells me is that whoever leaked this is not very tech savvy,”
he said.
The Tor network functions as a sort of Internet maze to throw off anyone
who tries to trace the origin of an electronic message, Mr. Meinrath
said. When the network receives a message, it bounces from server to
server. The ordinary Internet pastes a series of addresses onto a
message, allowing it to be traced back to the sender. In contrast, the
Tor network strips that information out.
When the message emerges from the network, the source is, in theory,
untraceable. Even so, it has long been known that intelligence and law
enforcement agencies have made extensive efforts to infiltrate the Tor
network and trace those who use it.
Many of the servers on the Tor network are run by volunteers. Mr.
Meinrath said that if the F.B.I. explored the network, it was possible
that investigators were not able to infiltrate enough servers on their
own to trace the origin of the documents.
“Probably the F.B.I. had some of that information but not all of it,”
Mr. Meinrath said.
Another possibility, he said, was that the volunteer was not operating a
server properly and kept information about the routes taken by the
messages passing through it.
A skilled hacker, Mr. Meinrath said, would take into account all of
these possibilities and add one or two additional layers of security to
the communication — for example, using software to cloak the identity of
the computer that sent the message and connecting to the Internet
somewhere that could not be linked to its source. Those measures seem to
have eluded those who did the hacking.
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