German police seize 'anonymizing' Tor servers
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(InfoWorld) - In a crackdown on Internet child pornography, German police detected several servers running a copy of Tor, a software designed to anonymize Internet usage. "We seized or blocked an undisclosed number of servers during a raid, which is still underway," Jens Gruhl, a spokesman for the public prosecutors office of Konstanz, Germany, said Monday. "A few of these computers had installed copies of Tor." Users of Tor software in the country, worried about an unexpected visit by the police, have decried the move in a flurry of blogs. "This situation is disturbing, really disturbing," wrote Alexander Janssen, from DÃ¼sseldorf, Germany,Â in a blog post. "I run a Tor server myself and the last thing I want to experience is the police kicking down my door [and] seizing my computer." Gruhl said German crime officials are not specifically searching for servers running Tor but for servers distributing child porn. "That fact that police discovered copies of Tor is coincidental, not intentional." In his blog, Janssen reckoned that the seized servers were configured to be so-called Tor "exit nodes," allowing their IP (Internet Protocol) addresses to show up in the server logfiles in question. Tor was created to defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that "threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships and state security," according to the Web siteÂ www.tor.eff.org. The software bounces communications around a distributed network of servers, called onion routers, protecting users from Web sites that build profiles of their interests, local eavesdroppers that read data or learn what sites they visit, and even the onion routers themselves.
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Servers that managed global internet traffic have been subjected to a concerted attack by hackers.
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A Briton has been arrested in connection with the theft of computer code for key net hardware.
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The company fixes a huge security vulnerability that made it possible for attackers to steal users' personal data. By the Associated Press.
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LONDON, Oct 9 (IPS) - Agents from the U.S. Federal Bureau of  Investigation (FBI) on Thursday seized two Internet servers in  Britain that host the web sites of the global news network  Indymedia. Two days later there was still no clarification of why  the computers were confiscated or who is holding them.
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Federal Trojan for 'online searches' Analysis Germany's police and secret services are pushing for a legal basis for "online house searches" â carried out without the knowledge of suspects, using spyware similar to a Trojan.â¦
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Hong Kong authorities have made their first arrest for allegedly sharing copyrighted files over the Internet, a spokeswoman said.
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The German public prosecutor's office raided seven ISPs late last week in an attempt to crack down on child pornography. Ten servers were seized, all of which were running a program called Tor, distributed by the EFF and billed as a way to protect user privacy by anonymizing Internet traffic.
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Two men were arrested during raids by police investigating the alleged sale of military weapons over the Internet.
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German police have broken up an Internet piracy operation that peddled millions of euros worth of bootleg films, computer games, music and software, police and prosecutors said on Friday.
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A money transfer firm broke EU privacy laws by secretly giving information to the US authorities, an inquiry finds.
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The FBI seized computers and software as part of an investigation into illegal sharing of copyrighted materials over peer-to-peer networks, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced.
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A world wide ring of pirates based around five Poles has been penetrated by police. A spokesperson for the Polish cyber cops have told Reuters that it had wound up an organised group, involving more than 100
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Blog: Low ransom request and a self-termination date on the code suggest this is a test attack.
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Trojan spam scam nipped in the bud German police have arrested ten people suspected of running a phishing scam designed to raid the contents of online bank accounts that netted hundreds of thousands of euros.â¦
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UK police have arrested a man on suspicion of stealing source code from networking giant Cisco. The 20 year-old was arrested following Metropolitan Police Computer Crime Unit raids in Manchester and Derbyshire on 3 September.
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German security services foiled a plan by Islamist militants to carry out "massive bomb attacks" against U.S. installations in Germany and arrested three suspects, officials said on Wednesday.