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.
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He most likely had bad OPSEC.
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.
This probably didn’t help much either.
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.
I’ve been looking into this myself recently and it’s definitely an interesting conversation.
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
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
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.
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.
Torrenting through Tor sounds like a recipe for disaster.
LEOs using what amount to phishing attacks to grab folks looking for CSAM has a long and storied history behind it.
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.
Mullvad is pretty good in this regard by forcing you to use their DNS. Though of course, you have to trust them.
Or use Tails which routes all network traffic through TOR
Tails is the best answer if you need protection
Agreed. There are countermeasures to take against everything I mentioned. You just have to be aware and ideally not be a criminal in the first place.
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.
You can do DNS in multiple ways. The question is what you try to do, or what your software tries to do.
This question gets asked every year and every time it turns out to be an OPSEC mistake instead
And hopefully will continue to be asked, because one day it may not be poor OPSEC.
Hopefully it will be asked by the very smart people who actually develop TOR, and not just paranoid Internet randos like OP.
True - although just because you are paranoid, that doesn't mean they aren't out to get you...
As far as we know. Could be mitm servers
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.
With Tor the question has always been compromised exit nodes as I understand it.
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.
The bro was really dumb to hide things behind an app like this...
Doesnt the prevalence of https solve this issue?
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 cant save you from bad opsec.
I went one step further than OP and actually read the article.
Web-based generative AI tools/chatbots
...
he created fake AI CSAM—but using imagery of real kids.
All the privacy apps in the world won't save you if you're uploading pics to a subscription cloud service.
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.
All the crypto in the world won't help if you do stupid stuff and have crap OPSEC.
A big part of that is stay under the radar. If I were NSA I'd be running a great many TOR nodes (both relay nodes and exit nodes) in the hope of generating some correlations. Remember, you don't need to prove in order to raise suspicion.
So for example if you have an exit node so you can see the request is CSAM related, and you run a bunch of intermediate nodes and your exit nodes will prefer routing traffic through your intermediate nodes (which also prefer routing traffic through your other intermediate nodes), you can guess that wherever the traffic goes after one or two relay hops through your nodes is whoever requested it.
If you find a specific IP address frequently relaying CSAM traffic to the public Internet, that doesn't actually prove anything but it does give you a suspicion 'maybe the guy who owns that address likes kiddy porn, we should look into him'.
Doing CSAM with AI tools on the public Internet is pretty stupid. Storing his stash on cell phones was even more stupid. Sharing any of it with anyone was monumentally stupid. All the hard crypto in the world won't protect you if you do stupid stuff.
So speaking to OP- First, I'd encourage you to consider moving to a country that has better free speech protections. Or advocate for change in your own country. It's not always easy though, because sadly it's the unpopular speech that needs protecting; if you don't protect the unpopular stuff you jump down a very slippery slope. We figured that out in the USA but we seem to be forgetting it lately (always in the name of 'protecting kids' of course).
That said, OP you should decide what exactly you want to accomplish. Chances are your nation's shitty law is aimed at public participation type websites / social media. If it's important for you to participate in those websites, you need to sort of pull an Ender's Game type strategy (from the beginning of the book)- create an online-only persona, totally separate from your public identity. Only use it from devices you know are secure (and are protected with a lot of crypto). Only connect via TOR or similar privacy techniques (although for merely unpopular political speech, a VPN from a different country should suffice). NEVER use or allude to your real identity from the online persona. Create details about your persona that are different from your own- what city you're in, what your age and gender are, what your background is, etc. NEVER use any of your real contact info or identity info.
Feasibility aside, the shitty laws in question attacks content hosting platforms first(safe harbor laws). So no matter how many vpns i hop through, the site would simply limit the visibility of my post in the region and go about their day.
No
Any even if it were what else would you use? There is no other software that comes close
Let's see here...
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.
Telegram - Lol. And I really wish they hadn't mentioned that hidden API...
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."
Stop and think about that for a second.
In this comment section: S P E C U L A T I O N, presented as fact. The truth is no one really knows, at least not yet...
I haven't been following the DNM seen much. Are there any good sources on the recent busts?
Mental Outlaw and seytonic on YouTube usually provide pretty good coverage.
Why wouldn't tor be compromised?
I would assume that because it is a popular open source software relied upon by millions that it theoretically shouldn't?
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.