Security News > 2020 > August > This is node joke. Tor battles to fend off swarm of Bitcoin-stealing evil exit relays making up about 25% of outgoing capacity at its height

The Tor Project has confirmed someone, or some group, is in control of a large number of Bitcoin-snaffling exit nodes in its anonymizing network, and it's battling to boot them off.

One observer reckons more than 23 per cent of the entire Tor network's exit capacity was under the command of one miscreant, or one group of miscreants, at one point in May, with the end goal being the theft of people's cryptocurrency.

It's one thing to be mindful of a rogue exit node operator eavesdropping on you, it's another thing when someone successfully adds a large number of exit nodes to Tor, all under their control, because it means some kind of elaborate campaign is underway to undermine Tor's security.

"As far as I know this is the first time we uncovered a malicious actor running more than 23 per cent of the entire Tor network's exit capacity. Since Tor clients usually use many Tor exit relays over time the chance to use a malicious exit relay increases over time."

"We still have contributors watching the network and reporting malicious relays to be rejected by our directory authorities, but they cannot do this full time," a Tor Project spokesperson told The Register.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/08/12/tor_exit_nodes/