Recently a group or researchers found and exploited some serious vulnerabilities in the Tor network. Tor is a free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis. “They performed an inventory of the network, finding 6,000 machines, many of whose IPs are accessible publicly and directly with the system’s source code.They demonstrated that it is possible to take control of the network and read all the messages that circulate.” This is very damaging to Tors reputation considering they are supposed to be securing people computers to some degree. “The specific attack that effected users created a virus and used it to infect such vulnerable systems in a laboratory environment, and thus decrypting traffic passing through them again via an unknown, unmentioned mechanism. Finally, traffic is redirected towards infected nodes by essentially performing a denial of service on clean systems.” All of these vulnerabilities create a lot of problems for the tor network and keep users wondering if this software is actual helping or hurting their computers.
http://thehackernews.com/2011/10/tor-anonymizing-network-compromised-by.html
RIT Cyber Security Policy and Law Class Blog 