All the recent dark net arrests seem to be pretty vague on how the big bad was caught (except the IM admin’s silly opsec errors) In the article they say he clicked on a honeypot link, but how was his ip or any other identifier identified, why didnt tor protect him.
Obviously this guy in question was a pedophile and an active danger, but recently in my country a state passed a law that can get you arrested if you post anything the government doesnt like, so these tools are important and need to be bulletproof.
The government is cagey about how, exactly, this criminal activity was unearthed, noting only that Herrera “tried to access a link containing apparent CSAM.” Presumably, this “apparent” CSAM was a government honeypot file or web-based redirect that logged the IP address and any other relevant information of anyone who clicked on it.
It looks like a combination of bad opsec and clicking on a download link.
I know there has been some back and forth whether it’s good to use a VPN with tor and feel like this is just going to open up that conversation again.
I’ve been looking into this myself recently and it’s definitely an interesting conversation.
It might depend on the VPN provider. If it’s someone like Google, no way.
But Mullivad that has a proven track record of not keeping logs, that might be worth it.
I’ve also heard tor over i2p but don’t know enough about the latter to have an opinion
I think the other aspect is that you could be adding more things to make you stand out amongst other tor users.
there’s a more technical term for all this but I can’t recall what it is
Bad opsec and illusion of anonymity will likely render all the extra steps null, most likely. Case in point, we’ve been reminding people not to torrent through Tor for years.
