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Carnegie Mellon researchers bribed to crack TOR

Cross-posted to 2 groups.

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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/12/fbi_paid_bounty_to_hack_tor_project/

This claim is almost hard to believe.

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The Tor Project is claiming that researchers at Carnegie Mellon 
University (CMU) were paid a hefty bounty by the FBI to stage an attack 
last year aiming to unmask the operators of the network's hidden 
servers.
"We have been told that the payment to CMU was at least $1 million," 
the group said in a blog post.
In July 2014 the Tor Project revealed that it had been the victim of a 
six-month hacking campaign which sought to flood the network with 
relays that modified Tor protocol headers to track hidden servers. 
Within a week Tor updated its software and pushed out new versions of 
code to block similar attacks in the future.
The attack was limited in that it didn't monitor entry and exit nodes 
to the Tor network, but could have been used to trace traffic patterns 
to hidden sites by the academics-for-hire. But the Tor Project is 
fuming that the FBI used the university to circumvent federal hacking 
laws.
"Such action is a violation of our trust and basic guidelines for 
ethical research. We strongly support independent research on our 
software and network, but this attack crosses the crucial line between 
research and endangering innocent users," said the group.

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Carnegie Mellon researchers bribed to crack TOR RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2015-11-13 11:26 +0300
  Re: Carnegie Mellon researchers bribed to crack TOR RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2015-11-17 09:18 +0300

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