The court confirmed the hacking of Tor by Carnegie Mellon University specialists and the transfer of the FBI data

Rumors that researchers from Carnegie Mellon University were able to crack the Tor network in 2014, having received a number of real IP network users, finally confirmed . The data obtained during this hacking, were transferred to the FBI - this information is also confirmed. So far, there is no clarity on how the hacking process itself took place, there are no basic technical details (which can be understood).

It is known that the information in question was collected during the Tor attack lasting several months in 2014. The attack was carried out by order of the US Department of Defense, which paid for all the work.

The FBI found out about this project, and through a court the Bureau forced the researchers to transfer a number of data obtained during the hacking. The data related to criminals closely related to Silk Road, the head of which was Ross Ulbricht, "The Terrible Pirate Rogers."
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Earlier, representatives of the university denied their involvement in hacking Tor, as well as denied the fact of payment for the work done by the FBI (there are also many ambiguities - who paid whom and how much). Representatives of the Tor Project insisted that it was the representatives of the university who hacked the network, taking a number of user data, and these data were later transferred to the FBI.

By the way, an application for the participation of representatives of Carnegie Mellon University was submitted to the Black Hat 2014 conference in August. The subject of the planned performance is the de-anonymization of Tor users for only $ 3000. Then the application was withdrawn, and the announcement was removed from the conference site.

It may well be that the FBI university did not pay anything. In any case, the following statement appeared on the institution's website in 2015: “One of the main tasks of the CERT unit of the SEI is the search and recognition of vulnerabilities in software and computer networks, in order to correct them. In the course of this work, the university occasionally encounters subpoenas, with the help of which [we are] asked for information about the research conducted. The university remains true to legal standards and fulfills the legal requirements of the plaintiffs, without receiving any financial resources for this. ”

The materials on the case of Brian Farrell, a member of The Silk Road team, indicated that the university specialists were hired by the US Department of Defense to conduct research work, the results of which were then obtained in court by the FBI.