The Tor Onion Routing network has long been a favorite way for privacy-seeking online users to add a series of anonymizing layers between themselves and sites on the Internet. From hackers and dissidents to companies and governments seeking to cloak their activities online, Tor has gained a significant following of users.
Yet anonymizing networks, or darknets, are also used by online criminals looking to hide their tracks. Two recent incidents underscore the appeal: One, the Silk Road, an online bazaar of drugs and illegal goods, was operated as a hidden site until the FBI arrested the alleged owner of the site in San Francisco in early October.
The other, a recent botnet known as Mevade, or Sefnit, routed its command-and-control traffic through the Tor network to hide the locations of infected nodes. The botnet traffic had a tremendous impact on Tor, driving its measure of simultaneous users from approximately 800,000 to more than 5 million, according to statistics on the Tor Project site.
Companies need to watch their networks for signs of the presence of darknets and for traffic to anonymous sites created to evade search engine crawlers, known as the deepweb.