Daily Archives: June 17, 2020

Tor Browser is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. Download Tor desktop app to experience real private browsing without tracking, surveillance, or censorship. It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Tor Browser for PC provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.

Features and Highlights

BLOCK TRACKERSTor Browser isolates each website you visit so third-party trackers and ads can't follow you. Any cookies automatically clear when you're done browsing. So will your browsing history.

DEFEND AGAINST SURVEILLANCEThe app prevents someone watching your connection from knowing what websites you visit. All anyone monitoring your browsing habits can see is that you're using Tor.

RESIST FINGERPRINTINGThe browser aims to make all users look the same, making it difficult for you to be fingerprinted based on your browser and device information.

MULTI-LAYERED ENCRYPTIONYour traffic is relayed and encrypted three times as it passes over the Tor network. The network is comprised of thousands of volunteer-run servers known as Tor relays.

BROWSE FREELYWith Tor Browser, you are free to access sites your home network may have blocked.

Also Available: Download Tor Browser for Mac

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Tor Browser Download (2020 Latest) for Windows 10, 8, 7

Need to hire an assassin, buy some contraband, view illegal porn, or just bypass government, corporate, or identity thief snooping? Tor is your answer. Tor, which stands for "The Onion Router" is not a product, but a protocol that lets you hide your Web browsing as though it were obscured by the many layers of an onion. The most common way to view the so-called Dark Web that comprises Tor sites is by using the Tor Browser, a modded version of Mozilla Firefox. Using this Web browser also hides your location, IP address, and other identifying data from regular websites. Accessing Tor has long been beyond the ability of the average user. Tor Browser manages to simplify the process of protecting your identity onlinebut at the price of performance.

What Is Tor?If you're thinking that Tor comes from a sketchy group of hackers, know that its core technology was developed by the U.S. Naval Research Lab and D.A.R.P.A.. The Tor Project non-profit receives sizeable donations from various federal entities such as The National Science Foundation. The Tor Project has a page listing many examples of legitimate types of Tor users, such as political dissidents in countries with tight control over the Internet and individuals concerned about personal privacy.

Tor won't encrypt your datafor that, you'll need a Virtual Private Network (VPN). Instead, Tor routes your Internet traffic through a series of intermediary nodes. This makes it very difficult for government snoops or aggressive advertisers to track you online. Using Tor affords far more privacy than other browsers' private (or Incognito) modes, since it obscures your IP address so that you can't be tracked with it. Standard browsers' private browsing modes discard your cached pages and browsing history after your browsing session. Even Firefox's new, enhanced private browsing mode doesn't hide your identifiable IP address from the sites you visit, though it does prevent them tracking you based on cookies.

Starting UpConnecting to the Tor network entails more than just installing a browser and firing up websites. You need to install support code, but luckily, the free Tor Browser bundle streamlines the process. Installers are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Tor Project recommends installing the browser on a USB drive for more anonymity and portability; the drive needs to have 80MB free space.

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We tested a standard Windows installer, with choices to create desktop icons and run the browser immediately. The browser itself is a heavily modified version of Firefox 38.5 (as of this writing), and includes several security plug-ins as well as security tweaks such as not caching any website data. For a full rundown of the PCMag Editors' Choice browser's many features, read our full review of Firefox.

Before merrily browsing along anonymously, you need to inform Tor about your Web connection. If your Internet connection is censored, you configure one way, if not, you can connect directly to the network. Since we live in a free society and work for benevolent corporate overlords, we connected directly for testing. After connecting to the Tor relay system (a dialog with a progress bar appears at this stage), the browser launches, and you see the Tor project's page.

InterfaceThe browser's home page includes a plea for financial support to the project, a search box using the anonymized Disconnect.me search, and a Test Tor Network Settings link. Hitting the latter loads a page that indicates whether you're successfully anonymized. We recommend taking this step. The page even shows your apparent IP addressapparent because it's by no means your actual IP address. We verified this by opening Microsoft Edge and checking our actual IP address on Web search sites. The two addresses couldn't have been more different, because the Tor Browser reports the IP address of a Tor node.

The browser interface is identical with Firefox, except with some necessary add-ons installed. NoScript, a commonly used Firefox add-on, is preinstalled and can be used to block most non-HTML content on the Web. The green onion button to the left of the address bar is the Torbutton add-on. It lets you see your Tor network settings, but also the circuit you're using: Our circuit started in Germany and passed through two different addresses in the Netherlands before reaching the good old Internet. If that doesn't suit you, you can request a new circuit, either for the current session or for the current site. This was one of our favorite features.

One thing we really like about the Tor Browser is how it makes existing security and privacy tools easier to use. NoScript, for example, can be a harsh mistress, who can be difficult to configure, and can break websites. But a security panel in the Torbutton presents you with a simple security slide. At the lowest, default setting, all browser features are enabled. At the highest setting, all JavaScript and even some image types are blocked, among other settings. This makes it easy to raise or lower the level of protection you need, without having to muck around in multiple settings windows.

Everything you do in the browser is tested for anonymity: When we tried full-screening the browser window, a message told us that that could provide sites a way to track us, and recommended leaving the window at the default size. And the project's site specifically states that using Tor alone doesn't guarantee anonymity, but rather that you have to abide by safe browsing guidelines: don't use BitTorrent, don't install additional browser add-ons, don't open documents or media while online. The recommendation to only visit secure HTTPS sites is optionally enforced by a plug-in called HTTPS Everywhere.

Even if you follow these recommendations, though, someone could detect the simple fact that you're using Tor, unless you set it up to use a Tor bridge relay. Those are not listed in the Tor directory, so hackers (and governments) would have more trouble finding them.

One thing we noticed while browsing the standard Web through Tor was the need to enter a CAPTCHA to access many sites. This is because your cloaked URL looks suspicious to website security services such as CloudFlare, used by millions of sites to protect themselves. It's just one more price you pay for anonymity.

We also had trouble finding the correct version of websites we wished to visit. Directing the Tor Browser to PCMag.com, for example, took us to the Netherlands localization of our website. We could not find any way to direct us back to the main URL, which lets you access the U.S. site.

The Dark WebYou can use Tor to anonymize browsing to standard websites, of course, but there's a whole hidden network of sites that don't appear on the standard Web at all, and are only visible if you're using a Tor connection. You can read all about it in our feature, Inside the Dark Web. If you use a standard search engine, even one anonymized by Disconnect.me, you just see standard websites. By the way, you may improve your privacy by switching to an anonymous search provider such as DuckDuckGo or Startpage.com. DuckDuckGo even offers a hidden search version, and Sinbad Search is only available through Tor. Ahmia is another search engine, on the open Web, for finding hidden Tor sites, with the twist of only showing sites that are on the up-and-up.

Tor hidden sites have URLs that end in .onion, preceded by 16 alphanumeric characters. You can find directories of these hidden sites with categories resembling the good old days of Yahoo. There's even a Tor Links Directory page (on the regular Web) that's a directory of these directories. There are many chat and message boards, but you even find directories of things like lossless audio files, video game hacks, and financial services such as anonymous bitcoin, and even a Tor version of Facebook. Many onion sites are very slow or completely downkeep in mind that they're not run by deep-pocketed Web companies. Very often we clicked an onion link only to be greeted with an "Unable to Connect" error. Sinbad helpfully displays a red "Offline on last crawl" bullet to let you know that a site is probably nonfunctional.

Speed and CompatibilityWebpage loading time under Tor is typically far slower than browsing with a standard Internet connection. It's really not possible to state definitively by how much your browsing will be slowed down if you use Tor, because it depends on the particular relay servers your traffic is being routed through. And this can change every time for every browsing session. As a very rough rule of thumb, however, PCMag.com took 11.3 seconds to load in Firefox and 28.7 seconds in the Tor Browser, at the same time, over the same FiOS connection on the open Web. Your mileage, of course, will vary.

As for browser benchmarks, the results hew to Firefox's own performance, with near-leading performance on all the major JavaScript tests, JetStream and Octane, for example. On our test laptop, the Tor Browser scored 20,195 on Octane, compared with 22,297 for standard Firefoxnot a huge difference. The Tor network routing is a far more significant factor in browsing performance than browser JavaScript speed. That is, unless you've blocked all JavaScript.

Keep in mind, though, that the Tor Browser is based on the Firefox Extended Support Release versions, which updates less frequently so that large organizations have time to maintain their custom code. That means you don't get quite the latest in Firefox performance and features, but security updates are delivered at the same time as new main versions.

There's a similar story when it comes to standards compatibility: On the HTML5Test.com site, which quantifies the number of new Web standards supported by a browser, the Tor Browser gets a score of 412, compared with 468 for the latest Firefox version. You may run into incompatible sites, though. For example, none of the Internet speed connection test sites performed correctly in the Tor Browser.

Tor, Browser of ThunderWith the near complete lack of privacy on today's Web, Tor is becoming more and more necessary. It lets you browse the Web knowing that all those tracking services aren't watching your every move. Most of us have experienced how an ad follows you from site to site, just because you clicked on, or searched for a product or service once. All that goes away.

Of course, you pay a price of extra setup and slower performance with the Tor Browser, but it's less onerous than you may think. And the included support for fine-grain privacy and security protection is excellent. If you take your online privacy seriously, you owe it to yourself to check out the Tor Browser. For standard, full-speed Web browsing, however, check out PCMag Editors' Choice Web browser, Firefox.

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Tor Browser Review | PCMag

Peeling back the layers of the onion

The Tor anonymity network receives no small amount of attention from the mainstream press not least for its purported association with cybercrime and darknet drug dealings.

But what is Tor? And how secure is it? The Daily Swigasked several security and privacy experts to answer all of your questions, and many more.

Tor is an internet communication method for enabling online anonymity. The same term is commonly used to refer to both the anonymity network and the open source software that supports it.

The Tor name derives from The Onion Router the name of a pioneering privacy project run by the US Naval Research Lab.

Tor directs internet traffic through a network of thousands of relays, many of which are set up and maintained by volunteers.

Messages are encapsulated in layers of encryption, comparable to the layers of an onion. Inside the Tor network are sites, or hidden services.

Tor facilitates anonymized browsing by allowing traffic to pass onto or through the network through nodes that only know the immediately preceding and following node in a relay.

The source and destination of messages is obscured by encryption.

Tor directs internet traffic through a network of thousands of relays

The easiest way to access the Tor network is through the Tor Browser. The Tor Browser is automatically connected to the Tor network and will place all your requests through it, while ensuring anonymity.

In addition, the browser comes with an added functionality that improves your security and privacy by disabling JavaScript, automatic image, video loading and more.

The Tor Browser bundle is developed by the Tor Project, a non-profit organisation that carries out research as well as maintaining the software used by the Tor anonymity network.

The Tor Browser is currently available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Theres also a version of Tor Browser for Android but not, as yet, an official version for iOS.

The Tor Browser is just a web browser, and you can still view the surface internet or clear web using the software.

However, the Tor Browser offers an extra level of privacy for normal web use or as a way to bypass government surveillance and censorship.

Some sites on the so-called dark web can only be accessed using Tor.

Vince Warrington, managing director of Protective Intelligence, explained: The dark web primarily those sites that can only be accessed via Tor is still generally the host to the illegal and illicit.

Whilst there are some legitimate sites (for example, the BBC now has a version of the BBC News website) our research indicates that over 95% of sites contain illegal or illicit material, he added.

While most people are only familiar with Tors use for illegal activities such as accessing online markets that sell drugs many other users access the Tor network.

These include:

Tor uses vary from bypassing censorship and avoiding online spying and profiling, to disguising the origin of traffic and hiding sensitive communications.

Tor offers anonymity, but only up to a point.

Those using the technology, and looking to keep their identity secret, also need to apply best practices in operational security (OpSec).

Charity Wright, a cyber threat intelligence advisor at IntSights and former NSA Chinese espionage expert, explained: Tor is a browser that can anonymize your network connection and your IP address that you are logging on from.

However, once you venture into illicit spaces, it is important to use pseudonyms and to hide your real name and never reveal your true location, nationality, or identifying pieces of information.

Any small clue can be used for people to find out who you are. Even more, federal agencies and law enforcement will use every detail about an online persona to find a wanted suspect, she added.

Tor is easily accessible via the Tor Browser

Tor is aimed at providing anonymous communication, but there have been numerous examples of people whose identities have been unmasked despite using Tor.

For example, The FBI recently closed a criminal case against the owner of Freedom Hosting, a dark web service that ran on the Tor network.

In addition, several research projects have shown varying levels of successful attacks that either attempted to eavesdrop on Tor-encrypted traffic or identify users.

Read more of the latest privacy news from The Daily Swig

Protective Intelligences Warrington commented: Its a myth to think that using Tor (even with a VPN) gives you total anonymity. With the tools we are using nowadays we can slowly strip back the layers of anonymity to find out who is behind the computer.

By using specialist software combined with open source intelligence basically searching the surface, deep, and dark web for small snippets of information we can build up a picture of a Tor user who is involved in illegal activity.

The era where Tor was a thorn in the side of law enforcement seems to be coming to an end.

Warrington explained: In the UK, the police and intelligence agencies have access to these tools, and the only limitation on identifying users of the dark web is resources. Theres simply not enough police dedicated to these kinds of investigations.

Tor has its limitations. Maintaining online anonymity is much more far reaching an exercise than simply using Tor.

Israel Barak, chief information security officer at Cybereason, told The Daily Swig: Tor, at its core, only gives you network level anonymity. It won't help you with applications on your computer that retain your identity and provide your identity to the internet service providers.

As an example, when an individual connects to Gmail, the computer or device you are using saves your identity, so you don't have to log on in the future.

Tor will not protect your anonymity from this, he warned.

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While the Tor network is designed to keep browsing habits away from service providers or webpage trackers, the most privacy-conscious users can go even further.

Boris Cipot, senior security engineer at Synopsys, added: To achieve the highest level of anonymity, one would need to get rid of any installation of OS or software with tracking, thus allowing the user to enter the Tor network with a clean slate.

This can be achieved with the use of Tails or Qubes OS, which run from a USB stick. They run fully in memory, so it is safe to use on existing hardware, but once activated, there is no trace of you.

The Tails operating system can be combined with Tor to help improve users anonymity online

Using Tor to browse the web involves accepting trade-offs.

The Tor Browser gives a user considerable anonymity advantages over other web browsers, such as Edge, Firefox, and Chrome.

While standard browsers can leak data that goes a long way to identifying the user even in private mode Tor was designed with anonymity in mind.

RELATED Firefox and Chrome yet to fix privacy issue that leaks user searches to ISPs

Tor does, however, saddle the user some significant limitations when browsing the internet.

For starters, browsing with Tor can be very slow, and so many people are unlikely to want to swap out their current browser.

Sluggish traffic speeds arise because data packets take a circuitous route through Tor, bouncing between various volunteers computers to reach their destinations.

Network latency is always going to be a problem in this scenario even if youre fortunate enough to avoid bottlenecks.

Tor also makes websites look like they were built 20 years ago, as much of the presentation and customization content of websites is stripped away by Tor, since these technologies can be used to identify the computer thats being used.

Opinions among experts are split over whether or not Tor has done much to directly affect browser development, but at a minimum the technology has done a great deal to raise awareness about privacy.

Chad Anderson, senior security researcher at DomainTools, commented: I dont know how much we can attribute back to modern browser improvements due to Tor, but I think privacy issues have certainly become more focused.

The browser shift to DNS-over-HTTPS, commonly called DoH, is a boost for user privacy and where DNS didnt work over Tor before, and in fact was an attack vector for de-anonymizing users, DoH fixes that, he added.

RECOMMENDED A guide to DNS-over-HTTPS how a new web protocol aims to protect your privacy online

Anderson continued: It used to be you could listen to traffic on a Tor exit node but now that SSL is near ubiquitous thanks to free certificates [from the likes of Lets Encrypt] thats less of an issue.

Arthur Edelstein, senior product manager for Firefox Privacy and Security, gave The Daily Swig a list of projects involving collaborations between Mozilla and Tor:

Current examples of Tors development projects include proof-of-concept work on human-memorable names, a collaboration with SecureDrop, the open source whistleblowing system based on Tor, among other examples.

Tor Project representative Al Smith told The Daily Swig: Currently, we only partnered with Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), but we want to continue expanding the proof-of-concept with other media and public health organizations in the future.

The Tor Project was recently obliged to lay off a third of its core staff in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The Daily Swig asked how the non-profit has sought to minimize the effect of this on development pipelines.

A representative of the Tor Project responded: Because we are now a smaller organization, we are creating more projects where different teams (e.g., Browser, Network, UX, Community, Anti-Censorship) come together and work on the same issue, instead of working in isolated groups on disparate pieces of work.

This is the approach we took to improve onion services for the Tor Browser 9.5 release, they added.

Despite the many and varied caveats about Tor the security experts we spoke to raised, none made any suggestion that the technology was unsafe.

In a typical response, Charles Ragland, a security engineer at threat intel agency Digital Shadows, explained: Generally speaking, as long as security updates are in place, and users are following privacy and anonymity best practices, yes, Tor is safe to use.

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What is Tor? Everything you need to know about the anonymity network - The Daily Swig

Kurtis Minder, co-founder and CEO of GroupSense, explains why the coronavirus has been big business for bad actors.

Dan Patterson, a Senior Producer for CBS News and CNET, interviewed GroupSense co-founder and CEO Kurtis Minder about what people should be aware of when it comes to coronavirus-related scams. The following is an edited transcript of the interview.

Dan Patterson: Kurtis Minder works for GroupSense, and they have been tracking some of the most outrageous coronavirus scams. Kurtis, what are you seeing right now that people need to pay attention to?

Kurtis Minder: Well, as you know, the stimulus money was allocated and when the bad guys saw it, they wanted to take advantage. What we noticed on the dark net was almost immediately a series of schemes and fraud schemes perpetrated toward the banks, the small business administration, and the other agencies that were affected by the stimulus money.

You see a combination of insiders who have access to some of the bank's internal processes. You see people who say, 'hey, look, I'm a middle manager at a bank at a nationwide bank who has access to approving these types of loans. If you send in certain types of applications, they actually provide the templates. We can get you approved with the SBA loans.'

SEE: Coronavirus: Critical IT policies and tools every business needs(TechRepublic Premium)

What they're using as seed data for these particular loan applications is stolen private information, PII data, of individuals on the dark net. They're kind of combining both the insider threats with the stolen PII data, combining that to make an effective fraud scheme against the government.

They wasted no time--it was almost immediate when we started seeing these pop up. In addition to the fraud schemes, we're also seeing people basically selling fraud kits to help people put in certain applications with certain agencies and things like this. We're just tracking which ones seemed to be more realistic and effective versus which ones are kind of pie in the sky stuff, but there's some real threats.

It spells out everything from the internal process of the organization that the scheme would be propagated against, including all of the necessary forms and then usually supplies the data associated with those forms. They would help you actually assume an identity. They package that all together into a nice package so that the actual person who buys the fraud kit doesn't actually have to be a sophisticated hacker. It could be a pretty normal person who knows how to use the Tor browser to get on the dark net. It's sort of dumbing down the sophistication of the folks who can take advantage of the scheme.

The most effective solution against fraud is having some awareness of where the seed data from the fraud is coming from. What enables fraud is information. Having an understanding of the fraud schemes that are being perpetrated, how they're being perpetrated, and working those into the anti-fraud process on the bank side and on the agency side is really the best way to combat that.

As you know, the folks who are perpetrating this on the dark net are largely anonymous, so it's pretty hard to attribute those to an individual. Law enforcement, I believe, is aware--there's not a whole lot they can do about it at the moment, so it's really about the anti-fraud programs.

Strengthen your organization's IT security defenses by keeping abreast of the latest cybersecurity news, solutions, and best practices. Delivered Tuesdays and Thursdays

GroupSense co-founder and CEO, Kurtis Minder.

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