National Crime Agency At War With Tor Network

Head of the NCA’s National Cyber Crime Unit, Andy Archibald has spoken out about their war on digital crime, especially that which takes place on the Tor Network. NCA is pretty new here in the UK, effectively the UK equivalent of the FBI and they’ve already proven they can effectively take down a site and make arrests on the Tor network, as we’ve seen last week with this closure of The Silk Road drug market place, which has led to multiple arrests around the world.

“You may think that you can operate anonymously online and have the security of Tor to conduct your business but you can’t. We have demonstrated from a law enforcement perspective that we can operate in that environment, we can recover intelligence and evidence in that environment, we can take action in that environment, and that has led to arrests right across the world.”

The Tor network promises the keep your location and identity private while browsing, it does this by heavily encrypting your connection several time and by bouncing that signal over several random servers around the world. This makes it difficult for you to be tracked, but it doesn’t make it impossible.

The NSA tacking this service is a big deal as the services has quickly become a home to everything from gun trafficking, drugs and indecent images. There are legitimate users on the service, but that hardly washes over the big issues.

“We recognise that there are some benefits in terms of Tor – the government and others would point out that in some countries there is a benefit to be able to communicate securely, and we wouldn’t want to interfere with that, but where criminals are using Tor to conduct their business, that’s the bit we’re interested in – we’re not interested in those who use the Tor for perfectly legitimate purposes, it’s for those who are using it to conduct and do criminal business and criminal activity.”

Things are changing quick in regards to the NCA and the Tor network, I imagine we’ll be hearing much more of both in the coming weeks and months.

Thank you Telegraph for providing us with this information.