FBI Special Agent visit Thursday August 8th

https://www.noisebridge.net/pipermail/noisebridge-discuss/2013-August/038824.html

by GuiA • 13 years ago

95 35 13 years ago

noisebridge.net

dmix• 13 years ago

Non-broken PDF links: http://intelreport.mandiant.com/

For anyone not aware Noisebridge runs TOR exit nodes out of SF. https://www.noisebridge.net/

I'm curious if their FBI policy is to say "I don't know anyone who runs Tor nodes".

Garthex• 13 years ago

That link just goes to their homepage. Here's the pdf: http://intelreport.mandiant.com/Mandiant_APT1_Report.pdf

simoncion3• 13 years ago

It's not.

See: https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Noisebridge_Tor/FBI

deadfall• 13 years ago

I found this thread about someone getting raided and 20 computer taken for running a TOR exit node.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/11/30/1521208/raided-for-ru...

woah• 13 years ago

It may be that the person did not, in fact, know anyone who runs TOR nodes.

gcb02• 13 years ago

mandiant thing

sounds like the kind of think the chinese would release to get the other governments to waste their resources making their firewall more efficient.

mct• 13 years ago

For anyone not aware Noisebridge runs TOR exit nodes out of SF

Noisebridge is based in SF, but the Tor exit node we run is a colo box in LA.

dictum• 13 years ago

I tensed up as he began to tell me that the Chinese have been utilizing the Noisebridge TOR exit node. He made it seem as if it was a very real threat
“There are times when they slip back into Cold War thinking and Cold War mentality,” Obama said on air Tuesday evening. “What I continually say to them and to President Putin, that’s the past.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/08...

simoncion3• 13 years ago

BTW, this visit isn't a special or unique thing. The Feds periodically stop by, asking about traffic that came through Noisetor. There's even a procedure in place for handling the situation:

https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Noisebridge_Tor/FBI

teawithcarl• 13 years ago

Why do our taxes in part support this invasion of privacy by NSA/FBI on American citizens ?

cinquemb2• 13 years ago

Because they'll stick guns at us and throw us in prison if we don't pay them off?

gsibble• 13 years ago

Careful, up-voting this comment will put you on an NSA list.

pionar• 13 years ago

How is walking into a public space and having a conversation with someone an invasion of privacy?

lukejduncan• 13 years ago

It's not public in the sense that applies to law enforcement. By that I mean, Noisebridge is a private community that happens to be rather open in terms of membership. "Public space" is more like the sidewalk or a government building.

Note: I'm not a lawyer, but that's my understanding

rdl2• 13 years ago

Law enforcement, and those acting under color of law, are (rightly) more constrained in their actions than private citizens, in a lot of ways.

dfc• 13 years ago

I did not read anything about an invasion of privacy. Did I miss it? I am not sure what is worse: ignoring the privacy debate or being the chicken little of privacy.

rdl2• 13 years ago

I wonder if you get more interesting government contacts for running a Tor exit node vs. a mixmaster mail anonymizer now.

I certainly got a lot of interesting contacts when running a remailer. It was awesome being able to talk to them as a relative peer (since I was doing defense contracting), and explain calmly why remailers are good, what level of monitoring is possible, what security assumptions the whole network operates under, how you would defeat it, and why it wouldn't be worth the effort.

gcb02• 13 years ago

Isn't the top reason people do run TOR exit nodes to help people behind gov firewalls?

So the "chinese" using it would be one of the purposes, wouldn't it?

Why instead the FBI don't do their work and say which sites that exit node should deny access to and be done with?

otakucode2• 13 years ago

Given my understanding of how Tor operates (please correct me if I'm wrong, I've never actually used Tor, though the recent government hardon against it has me tempted), it would not be possible to block specific people from using your exit node. Or are you referring to, say, blocking all people coming from that exit node from connecting to some site on the regular Internet? I suppose that should be possible, though justifying it would be hard and the traffic should just route through a different exit node, right?

I'd want to know what makes the FBI think they've identified someone coming through the Tor network. And how.

tzs2• 13 years ago

I tensed up as he began to tell me that the Chinese have been utilizing the Noisebridge TOR exit node

I don't know if there is anything sneaky going on in China to justify FBI interest, but I HAVE seen some pretty weird traffic from China. I wonder if anyone else here has noticed anything similar. Here's what I've been seeing.

The products we sell where I work that are available for download are only sold to US and European markets (we have nothing against the rest of the world--we just don't have the resources to support more regions or to handle payments from other regions). The product is not very useful if you do not have a subscription to the accompanying service.

The product is also not very well known (I doubt we are even in the top 100 in our market), and there aren't many links out their pointing to our download page.

So, when I check the logs of downloads, what I expect to see is mostly US addresses, and a few European addresses (most of our customers are in the US).

For downloads that complete in one HTTP requests, what I see is 69% from the US, 12% from China, 14% from the rest of the world, and 5% unknown. So already China is higher than I would expect.

It gets even weirder when I look at partial downloads. First of all, 3 times as many IP addresses hit our site in a given time period and do partial downloads than do complete downloads.

Of the IP addresses doing partial downloads, 85% are from China, 7% from the US, 6% from the rest of the world (and most of those are Asian countries), and 2% unknown. 92% of those Chinese IP addresses doing partial downloads do not download enough total data from all the requests from that IP address to have received the full download.

Overall, if I don't distinguish between partial and full downloads, and count an IP address has having downloaded if it has received a total number of bytes large enough to contain our file, what I have is this: 59% of the IP addresses are Chinese addresses that do not download enough, 20% are US that do download enough, 8% are Chinese that do download enough, 5% are from the rest of the world and download enough.

None of these things identify themselves as bots. They all identify as a normal looking mix of Windows and Mac browsers.

I've looked at a few of the Chinese addresses to see what is nearby, and many seem to be in class C blocks that belong to hosting providers, not end user ISPs, and when I've been able to find some host names mapping to those blocks, they have tended to be things like allshemales.net or dirtyracialporn.com (not sure I remembered the exact names--the general idea is right).

In contrast, when I do the same for a few randomly chosen US downloaders, I get blocks that seem to clearly be consumer ISP ranges they use for their customers.

Some of the access patterns are interesting. I saw one that would come, do two concurrent requests, get 60 KB, and go away for exactly 3600 seconds. It did this until it grabbed the whole download (or at least enough data for it to have the whole download). I might guess some kind of download manager, but I've never seen one that is so slow.

So, what the devil is going on? I can't even come up with a plausible sounding theory that would explain this much Chinese activity on our site, let along explain why so much of it is just partial downloads, and why it seems to be coming from sites at data centers (which I assume indicates some kind of commercial source). Anyone else seeing this kind of thing?

I have no reason to suspect anything sinister is going on. I just can't figure out any reason at ALL for this to be going on.

simoncion3• 13 years ago

Maybe these are bots that are designed to circumvent the Great Firewall?

Ecio782• 13 years ago

I hope I am wrong, but could it be that one of your download host has been compromised and it is been used for some sort of command-and-control server of a small botnet?

tzs2• 13 years ago

The downloads are hosted on Rackspace's CDN. I think if that were compromised, it would have been noticed.

jmh42• 13 years ago

I may be completely wrong here, but I thought TOR doesn't work in China. Something about them blocking the relays or their traffic only supporting TCP and no UDP...

(Sorry for lack of support here.)

FBI Special Agent visit Thursday August 8th

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