Russian Botnet Taking Over Tor Network, Now Accounts For 80% Of Users

Reports suggest that a Russian Botnet has managed to infiltrate and flood the Tor network. The number of Tor users has been slowly rising as people look to protect themselves from government surveillance and take more consideration for their own privacy but an increase of over 2 million users in less than a month is looking very strange. Apparently the reason for this is that most of these 2 million new users are nodes in a Russian Botnet. The Botnet apparently isn’t new either and is switching to Tor for communication with its command and control centre to make the location of the central servers much more difficult to discover.

Why would it want to hide its central servers? Well the Russian Botnet is probably actively involved in cyber crime of some nature – clickfraud, stealing bank account details, server ransomware and the like. By shielding and protecting the location of its central servers it makes it difficult for any police services to locate them and shut them down. Whether it is possible for the Tor network to be over-loaded with these Botnet nodes is another matter. I am sure we will find out in the coming weeks what the consequences of it are.

Image courtesy of Tor Project