Hackers have discovered that a Russian Intelligence contractor was trying to breach Tor .
What is Tor?
In case you’ve never heard of it, Tor is a web browser that allows you to surf the web privately without fear of government surveillance or being tracked. It is very popular in Russia although it is available in other countries.
Is Tor a good browser?
Aside from this recent news, it’s okay, but there are better options that we will get into later.
How were they trying to do this?
When someone uses Tor, their internet service provider gets a ping that lets them know that it is being used. However, the ISP doesn’t get notified about what websites they were surfing.
The hackers stole more than seven terabytes of data from SyTech, the Russian Intelligence contractor.
In that data, they discovered that SyTech planned to use a program called Nautilus-S to discover what website a Tor user was on before closing the window.
Did it work?
Oddly enough, this breaching plan seemed like more trouble than it was worth. Even if you were a Tor user in Russia, there was a slim chance that you were susceptible to the breach, and an even slimmer chance that the info would be sent back to SyTech.
According to a statement from a Tor spokesperson, even if a Tor user was affected by the breach, they were still kept anonymous.
What should I do?
Unless you live in Russia and worry about government surveillance, you probably aren’t a Tor user. If you are, you might want to switch your browser of choice.
If you haven’t been convinced by all the wonderful security features we’ve already written about , then hopefully this news has convinced you to finally switch to Firefox or Brave .
Mozilla Firefox