Security researchers tonight are poring over a piece of malicious software that takes advantage of a Firefox security vulnerability to identify some users of the privacy-protecting Tor anonymity network.
The malware showed up Sunday morning on multiple websites hosted by the anonymous hosting company Freedom Hosting. That would normally be considered a blatantly criminal “drive-by” hack attack, but nobody’s calling in the FBI this time. The FBI is the prime suspect.
“It just sends identifying information to some IP in Reston, Virginia,” says reverse-engineer Vlad Tsrklevich. “It’s pretty clear that it’s FBI or it’s some other law enforcement agency that’s U.S.-based.”
If Tsrklevich and other researchers are right, the code is likely the first sample captured in the wild of the FBI’s “computer and internet protocol address verifier,” or CIPAV, the law enforcement spyware first reported by WIRED in 2007.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/08/freedom-hosting/
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I had posted a link about this yesterday. I don't use TOR but I figured others here do.
Tor users targeted with spyware following anonymous Web-host shutdown
The news that the alleged owner of Freedom Hosting, the internet host for a great number of Tor hidden services, has been arrested and is accused of distributing and promoting child pornography has resounded across the Internet and has explained why in the last few days there were mass outages of Tor hidden services.
But that was not the end of it, because it has been discovered that the pages hosted by Freedom Hosting have been modified to include a specially crafted malicious JavaScript. It's only purpose is to exploit a flaw in Firefox 17 so that the IP address of the user is revealed and sent to a server in Virginia believed to be operated by the FBI.
The 28-year-old Eric Eoin Marques was arrested in Dublin on Thursday on the basis of an extradition warrant issued by a US court on July 29, and has been denied bail until the Irish High Court has had time to review the case. He is scheduled to appear before the court again later this week.
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