All the recent dark net arrests seem to be pretty vague on how the big bad was caught (except the IM admin’s silly opsec errors) In the article they say he clicked on a honeypot link, but how was his ip or any other identifier identified, why didnt tor protect him.
Obviously this guy in question was a pedophile and an active danger, but recently in my country a state passed a law that can get you arrested if you post anything the government doesnt like, so these tools are important and need to be bulletproof.
There are many ways your real IP can leak, even if you are currently using Tor somehow. If I control the DNS infrastructure of a domain, I can create an arbitrary name in that domain. Like artemis.phishinsite.org, nobody in the world will know that this name exists, the DNS service has never seen a query asking for the IP of that name. Now I send you any link including that domain. You click the link and your OS will query that name through it’s network stack. If your network stack is not configured to handle DNS anonymously, this query will leak your real IP, or that of your DNS resolver, which might be your ISP.
Going further, don’t deliver an A record on that name. Only deliver a AAAA to force the client down an IPv6 path, revealing a potentially local address.
Just some thoughts. Not sure any of this was applicable to the case.
There are many ways to set up something that could lead to information leakage and people are rarely prepared for it.
Mullvad is pretty good in this regard by forcing you to use their DNS. Though of course, you have to trust them.
Or use Tails which routes all network traffic through TOR
Tails is the best answer if you need protection
Agreed. There are countermeasures to take against everything I mentioned. You just have to be aware and ideally not be a criminal in the first place.
Does Tor have no protection against such a simple attack? I always thought any clearnet address i type in the browser (along with the dns query) hops 3 times.
The Tor network cannot protect against that, because the attack circumvents it. Certain tools, like the Tor browser, do have protection against it (as much as they can) when you use them correctly, but they cannot keep users from inadvertently opening a link in some other tool. Nor can they protect against other software on a user’s device, like a spyware keyboard or the OS provider working with law enforcement.
You can do DNS in multiple ways. The question is what you try to do, or what your software tries to do.
It’s unlikely that the Tor browser is configured as the default browser, so when you click the link, it will open in something else
Then doesn’t that mean that the guy was somehow shortlisted and handpicked to be served that honeypot link?
I can’t answer this with confidence, but I was thinking the link in the email opened in the default browser, which wasn’t Tor in their case. Or something in the email client perhaps. Ultimately, I have no idea what happened and I was just speculating