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Comment by romland | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by large projects? The size of the files they transfer?

Your machine -> TOR -> hacked home user or server -> your target.

This way you only transfer the files between the target and the hacked server, and from there on to a torrent, and heck, why not let that machine seed it too.

Chances are that they even used a chain of hacked machines to get to their target. It gets pretty complicated pretty quickly if you (as in FBI et al) have to raid several companies to get your hands on machines to do forensics on.

I doubt these files (or much of anything else) ever touched the criminal's physical machine. Unless, of course, they fucked up by, say, posting to pastebin or a tweet or something else that is seemingly insignificant (at the time) using their own IP.

Most tend to.

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This mirrors an idea that I had. TOR is a military project, and you know at least some of the exit nodes are controlled by the US gov't. Why not replicate TOR with a botnet? Bounce your communications around a plethora of average joes and you have yourself a more stable tor. If you spread the botnet without a CnC server and have the infected machines bounce random traffic around, it would be damned difficult to break. TOR is open source, so it shouldn't be too hard to modify it to work on a private network. The nice thing about it is that if you attract to much heat you can always ditch the network and start a new one.

> you know at least some of the exit nodes are controlled by the US gov't

http://www.google.com/search?q=high+traffic+colluding+tor+ro...

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/17/report_hightraffic_c.ht...

Oh, neat. I didn't realise the issue had been resolved. Thanks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7nfN4bOOQI

People do run their own private onions.

Ahhh, didn't know they went onto hacked machines. So - some people should be getting some knocks on their door soon?

Yup, you use a compromised Windows machine or Linux server in a third world country as a proxy. When you're done, you wipe the disk.

3rd world country only? You mean nothing else outside your own country works? tsk tsk.

Third world governments aren't exactly known for being cooperative with western governments. I'd rather have a rooted box in China or Pakistan than in North America or Europe.

That's the unfortunate bit -- some innocent people are likely to get their dog shot as the FBI busts down their door with assault rifles to seize a laptop.

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