Security News

The Tor Project team has announced the release of Tor Browser 11.5, a major release that brings new features to help users fight censorship easier. The Tor Browser has been created specifically for accessing sites through The Onion Router network to offer users anonymity and privacy when accessing information on the internet.

One of the common techniques used by these threat actors to try to add a strong layer of anonymity consists of using The Onion Router network to hide the location of their servers. It is important to note that servers hosted on the Tor network are just typical servers hosted on the Internet - users are merely accessing them via a special network.

Speek! is a new encrypted chat service that uses Tor to offer secure communication. Speek! isn't quite like the chat apps and services you are used to.

The maintainers of the Tails project have issued a warning that the Tor Browser that's bundled with the operating system is unsafe to use for accessing or entering sensitive information. "We recommend that you stop using Tails until the release of 5.1 if you use Tor Browser for sensitive information," the project said in an advisory issued this week.

The Tor Project has published details about a newly introduced system called Congestion Control that promises to eliminate speed limits on the network. Congestion Control "Will result in significant performance improvements in Tor, as well as increased utilization of our network capacity," say the maintainers of the project.

REvil ransomware's servers in the TOR network are back up after months of inactivity and redirect to a new operation that appears to have started since at least mid-December last year. It is unclear who is behind the new REvil-connected operation but the new leak site lists a large catalog of victims from past REvil attacks plus two new ones.

Twitter is now accessible over the Tor network, allowing users in countries that banned it to continue accessing the social network's site. The new onion URL was announced today by security engineer Alec Muffett who announced that Twitter can now be accessed worldwide via the Tor browser.

Russia has reportedly blocked access to Western media outlets including the BBC to netizens within its borders, as suspicions rise that the country has begun implementing a "Splinternet" plan to seal itself off from the wider internet. These frequencies can be received clearly in Kyiv and parts of Russia.

US-based Tor Project and Russian digital-rights protection org RosKomSvoboda are appealing a Russian court's decision to block access to public Tor nodes and the project's website. The non-profit Tor Project operates the Tor decentralized network, which runs on top of the Internet, allowing users to bypass censorship, access websites anonymously, and visit special Onion URLs accessible only over Tor.

Russia has stepped up its censorship efforts in the country by fully banning access to the Tor web anonymity service, coinciding with the ban of six virtual private network operators, as the government continues to control the internet and crackdown on attempts to circumvent locally imposed web restrictions. Russia accounts for 15% of all Tor users, with more than 310,000 daily users, second only to the U.S. Tor, short for The Onion Router, enables users to automatically encrypt and reroute their web requests through a network of Tor relays for anonymizing network traffic, as well as help bypass censorship and protect their identities from the internet service providers and the websites they visit.