Sure, a VPN makes it difficult for most people to join the dots, but it doesn’t prevent everyone from doing do, for the simple reason that the VPN provider always knows where your requests come from, where they’re going, and what data you ultimately send and receive. So, as you can see, a VPN deals with the first issue listed above: disguising your true location on the network.īut a VPN doesn’t deal with the second issue, namely making it difficult for anyone to “join the dots”. The encrypted connection between your computer is dubbed a VPN tunnel, and is, in theory, invisible to, or at least unsnoopable by, other people online. To make it difficult for anyone to “join the dots” by tracing your web browsing requests back to your computer.Īt this point, you might be thinking, “But that’s exactly what a VPN does, and not just for my browsing but for everything I do online.”Ī VPN ( virtual private network) encrypts all your network traffic and relays it in scrambled form to a VPN server run by your VPN provider, where it’s unscrambled and “injected” onto the internet as if it originated from that VPN server.Īny network replies are therefore received by your VPN provider on your behalf, and delivered back to you in encrypted form.To disguise your true location on the network while you browse, so servers don’t know where you are.The Tor network (Tor is short for the onion router, for reasons that will be obvious in a moment if you imagine an onion coming apart as you peel it), which was originally designed by the US Navy, aims: So let’s look quickly at how Tor works, how crooks (and countries with strict rules about censorship and surveillance) might abuse it, and just how scary the abovementioned headline really is. That sounds more than just worrying – it makes it sound as though using Tor could be making you even less secure than you already are, and therefore that going back to a regular browser for everything might be an important step. …then one in four of those visits (perhaps more!) will be subject to the purposeful scrutiny of cybercriminals.

Loosely speaking, that strapline implies that if you visit a website using Tor, typically in the hope of remaining anonymous and keeping away from unwanted surveillance, censorship or even just plain old web tracking for marketing purposes…

23% of the Tor network’s exit capacity has been attacking Tor users How Malicious Tor Relays are Exploiting Users in 2020 (Part I) Written as an independent research piece by an author going only by nusenu, the story is headlined: An article published on the open-to-allcomers blogging site Medium earlier this week has made for some scary headlines.

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