On Mittwoch, 18. September 2024 09:10:31 CEST Florian Kohrt via tor-relays wrote:
A few facts from these German films and notes:
- "Boystown" was one of the largest pedophile darknet forums of all time. 400.000 User - The administrator's chats played a crucial role in tracking him down. - It finally takes a year and a half until they identify the node (Guard) that Admin uses to connect to the Tor network. - The timing analysis included complete surveillance of the mobile operator Telefónica (o2). We have four mobile phone networks in Germany. Telefónica Group o2 has almost 43 million mobile phone customers. - When he was arrested, Admin confessed everything and gave out all passwords. - Police did not have the victims' pictures deleted. wtf!
In recent years, STRG_F has researched and reported a _lot_ about paedocriminal matters. The German police arrest some masterminds to make headlines. They don't care about the victims. Although it would have been very easy to have the pictures deleted, they did nothing. :-( All material was still available on the servers. I also accused the officers of this during the search of my house.
The journalists from STRG_F were able to have material they found during research deleted very easily by the providers. This happened within a few hours or 1-2 days.
Today, NDR issued a press release with more details on the subject:
https://www.ndr.de/der_ndr/presse/mitteilungen/Ermittlungen-im-sogenannten-D arknet-Strafverfolger-hebeln-Tor-Anonymisierung-aus,pressemeldungndr24724.ht ml
It mentions that the (German) Federal Criminal Police Office identified twice the respective node that connected a suspect to Tor, and twice the entry node used by the Ricochet messenger.
It cites multiple sources who claim to know about broad surveillance measures against Tor servers. Matthias Marx, spokesperson of the Chaos Computer Club, is quoted that together with the documents obtained by the journalists this suggests that timing attacks were indeed successfully committed.
There is also a front page article on Tagesschau.de with largely the same information:
https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/panorama/tor-netzwerk-100.html
Later today, further reports are to be expected by Panorama and STRG_F, which should become available here: