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The administration of the Tor Project project announced the shutdown of more than 800 servers of its infrastructure. This represents approximately 13.5% of the total number of servers that support the Tor network — there are about 6,000 such servers. It is reported that about 750 disconnected servers served as intermediate relays providing a chain of encrypted request forwardings. Another 62 servers were output nodes - using their IP addresses, visitors, following a chain of encrypted connections, got access to both regular Internet resources and sites in the "dark network", while maintaining their anonymity.
The reason for the shutdown was that all of the listed servers used outdated and unsupported versions of Tor software, which created a risk of disclosing anonymity and potentially allowed organizing successful cyber attacks on the network. In current versions of Tor software, the corresponding vulnerabilities were fixed, but server administrators, for unclear reasons, did not consider it necessary to install updates. The shutdown was fully approved by a researcher under the nickname Lunar, a leading security specialist at TorWorld, which provides support for Tor servers. “The timely installation of security updates is crucial,” he said. - However, in the entire hosting industry, I very often observe a situation where server owners are limited to
The Tor report does not say how disabling 13.5% of all network servers can affect its performance and, in particular, the connection speed.
The reason for the shutdown was that all of the listed servers used outdated and unsupported versions of Tor software, which created a risk of disclosing anonymity and potentially allowed organizing successful cyber attacks on the network. In current versions of Tor software, the corresponding vulnerabilities were fixed, but server administrators, for unclear reasons, did not consider it necessary to install updates. The shutdown was fully approved by a researcher under the nickname Lunar, a leading security specialist at TorWorld, which provides support for Tor servers. “The timely installation of security updates is crucial,” he said. - However, in the entire hosting industry, I very often observe a situation where server owners are limited to
The Tor report does not say how disabling 13.5% of all network servers can affect its performance and, in particular, the connection speed.