It looks like we might see something similar to this again..
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28573625Developers of software used to access Tor - an otherwise hard-to-reach part of the internet - have disclosed that an attack on the network may have unmasked users for five months.
The Tor Project said that it believed the assault was designed to de-anonymise the net addresses of people operating or visiting hidden sites.
However, it said it was not sure exactly how users had been "affected". The project added that it believed it had halted the attack on 4 July.
Tor allows people to visit webpages without being tracked and to publish sites whose contents does not show up in search engines.
The Tor Project suggests the perpetrator compromised the network via a "traffic confirmation attack".
This involves the attacker controlling both the first part of the circuit of nodes involved - known as the "entry relay" - as well as the exit relay.
By matching the volumes and timings of the data sent at one end of the circuit to those received at the other end, it becomes possible to reveal the Tor user's identity because the computer used as an entry relay will have logged their internet protocol (IP) address.
The project believes the attacker used this to reveal hidden-site visitors by adding a signal to the data sent back from such sites that included the encoded name of the hidden service.
Now that its been demonstrated that methods exist to gain further information on Tor users I suspect it will be just a matter of time until we see further attacks on the Tor network each trying to leverage some small segment of data into a worthwhile exploit, even if this is now not possible I expect the governments of the world to try every avenue.
