Top-secret national security documents disclosed to the Guardian
by Edward Snowden show United States and British intelligence
have long attempted to crack the Tor anonymizer network used by
human rights workers, journalists, cybercriminals and others.
On Friday, the Guardian published leaked documents attributed to
the former intelligence contractor revealing how the US National
Security Agency and Britain’s Government Communications
Headquarters, or GCHQ, have worked extensively towards
compromising the computers of people who browse the Internet with
Tor, a program that routes traffic through multiple nodes in an
effort to help mask the identities of its users.
According to the Guardian’s James Ball, Bruce Schneier and Glenn
Greenwald, the NSA’s “current successes against Tor rely on
identifying users and then attacking vulnerable software on their
computer.”
“While it seems that the NSA has not
compromised the core security of the Tor software or network, the
documents detail proof-of-concept attacks, including several
relying on the large-scale online surveillance systems
maintained by the NSA
andGCHQthrough
internet cable taps,” the writers add.
Copyright: RT