Tor is popular among users seeking to bypass censorship, avoid online spying and profiling, or hide sensitive communications. But while it’s true that Tor obfuscates data packets and routes them via multiple volunteer-run nodes, it doesn’t necessarily protect against all types of attacks.

Check for TOR anonymity risks; some applications can leak a significant amount of data about their use of Tor. For example, Tor only protects TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) traffic, not other network protocols like UDP and ICMP (internet control message protocol), which can reveal information about application connections to the Internet. Similarly, many dark web sites don’t use SSL certificates, so the data that travels between your device and them could be exposed by a malicious actor.

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Moreover, while the developers of Tor have designed it to be secure, attackers can exploit its vulnerabilities to compromise systems and data. As a result, organizations using Tor should perform regular checks to assess whether threat actors are leveraging it to conduct reconnaissance, exploitation, C2 or data exfiltration.

A quick search of the Internet will show that cybercriminals and even government agencies are able to sniff Tor connections, and they don’t need a warrant to do so. In addition, malicious exit nodes can inject content into unencrypted HTTP traffic or modify unencrypted binary downloads to add malware or expose the corporate network to infections.

Another risk relates to the way that Tor generates SSL certificates. By omitting the final 80 bits of a site’s hash, Tor creates certificates that are easy to brute force. Consequently, an attacker can generate a certificate for a website that matches the hash of an existing site and then intercept encrypted traffic.