161

submitted 3 months ago by Artemis_Mystique@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

66 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 26 points 3 months ago

The government is cagey about how, exactly, this criminal activity was unearthed, noting only that Herrera "tried to access a link containing apparent CSAM." Presumably, this "apparent" CSAM was a government honeypot file or web-based redirect that logged the IP address and any other relevant information of anyone who clicked on it.

It looks like a combination of bad opsec and clicking on a download link.

I know there has been some back and forth whether it's good to use a VPN with tor and feel like this is just going to open up that conversation again.

[-] governorkeagan 8 points 3 months ago

I’ve been looking into this myself recently and it’s definitely an interesting conversation.

[-] CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 3 months ago

It might depend on the VPN provider. If it's someone like Google, no way.

But Mullivad that has a proven track record of not keeping logs, that might be worth it.

I've also heard tor over i2p but don't know enough about the latter to have an opinion

[-] governorkeagan 4 points 3 months ago

I think the other aspect is that you could be adding more things to make you stand out amongst other tor users.

there’s a more technical term for all this but I can’t recall what it is

[-] CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 3 months ago

Differentiators? The idea behind the tor browser specifically is to make it harder to fingerprint you by giving trackers the exact same information for each browser session across all its users, making it harder to differentiate between one user and another.

[-] governorkeagan 1 points 3 months ago

This is what I wars thinking of, thank you!

[-] quant@leminal.space 4 points 3 months ago

Bad opsec and illusion of anonymity will likely render all the extra steps null, most likely. Case in point, we've been reminding people not to torrent through Tor for years.

[-] governorkeagan 3 points 3 months ago

Torrenting through Tor sounds like a recipe for disaster.

[-] drwho@beehaw.org 4 points 3 months ago

LEOs using what amount to phishing attacks to grab folks looking for CSAM has a long and storied history behind it.

this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024

161 points (92.1% liked)

Privacy

32179 readers

735 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS