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.
Secondly, he took this imagery he had created and then "turned to AI chatbots to ensure these minor victims would be depicted as if they had engaged in the type of sexual contact he wanted to see." In other words, he created fake AI CSAM—but using imagery of real kids.
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.
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.
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.
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
Well OPSEC is the stated cause. Who knows how the person was initially identified and tracked. For all we know he was quickly identified through some sort of Tor backdoor that the feds have figured out, but they used that to watch for an unrelated OPSEC mistake they could take advantage of. That way the Tor backdoor remains protected.
Compromised ? Maybe, but this guy doesn't provide any evidence one way or the other. He's using at least 7 other possible vectors (apparently Calculator Photo Vault just hides the gallery, no encryption, so it's over right there) which is way too many for good opsec.
In that article they provide a list of steps to follow to be safer on Tor. Is that a good list or is there anything else one can do to maintain their privacy?
No idea, I was just using it to illustrate the existence of compromised exit nodes, which to my mind are a pretty fatal flaw in TOR, perhaps someone knowledgeable can chime in.
Not against a government that can compel the organizations who issue the https certificates and run the https servers. And not against leaks that occur outside of https.
Tor was always comrpomised, the point has never been to be uncrackable, the point is that tracking down an induvidual user is enough effort that it can't just be done on mass like with normal internet traffic. If you draw direct attention to yourself then it isn't going to save you.
Exactly. Tor was originally created so that people in repressive countries could access otherwise blocked content in a way it couldn’t be easily traced back to them.
It wasn’t designed to protect the illegal activities of people in first world countries that have teams of computer forensics experts at dozens of law enforcement agencies that have demonstrated experience in tracking down users of services like Tor, bitcoin, etc.
Welp repressive countries have more stringent teams of computer forensics experts now.
Though compared to our neighbours i wouldn't call my country repressive(yet)
Potato Chat - This is the first I've heard of it so I can't speak to it one way or another. A cursory glance suggests that it's had no security reviews.
Enigma - Same. The privacy policy talks about cloud storage, so there's that. The following is also in their privacy policy:
A super group can hold up to 100,000 people, and it is not technically suitable for end-to-end encryption. You will get this prompt when you set up a group chat. Our global communication with the server is based on TLS encryption, which prevents your chat data from being eavesdropped or tampered with by others... The server will index the chat data of the super large group so that you can use the complete message search function when the local message is incomplete, and it is only valid for chat participants... we will record the ID, mobile phone number, IP location information, login time and other information of the users we have processed.
So, plaintext abounds. Definite OPSEC problem.
nandbox - No idea, but the service offers a webapp client as a first class citizen to users. This makes me wonder about their security profile.
Tor - No reason to re-litigate this argument that happens once a year, every year ever since the very beginning. Suffice it to say that it has a threat model that defines what it can and cannot defend against, and attacks that deanonymize users are well known, documented, and uses by law enforcement.
mega.nz - I don't use it, I haven't looked into it, so I'm not going to run my mouth (fingers? keyboard?) about it.
Web-based generative AI tools/chatbots - Depending on which ones, there might be checks and traps for stuff like this that could have twigged him.
This bit is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the article: "...created his own public Telegram group to store his CSAM."
It's just that if I were the FBI, or the CIA, or a large criminal organisation, why wouldn't I be putting a lot of money and the best people I could find on sneaking backdoors for tor into the onion somehow. What a treasure trove of the most potent information there is there! If you can crack tor, you own the keys to the underworld and enough blackmail fodder to get you almost anything you want.