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Cyber Risks · Krebs on Security

Treasury Dept: Tor a Big Source of Bank Fraud

Summary: A non-public FinCEN report released December 2, 2014 examined 6,048 suspicious activity reports banks filed between August 2001 and July 2014 and found 975 hits tied to more than 6,000 known Tor nodes, representing nearly $24 million in likely fraudulent activity. FinCEN concluded that in the majority of those filings, most often account takeovers, the activity might have been prevented had the institution known its network was being accessed via Tor IP addresses, and that Tor-related filings rose 50 percent from October 2007 to March 2013 and 100 percent from March 2013 to July 2014.

Bottom line: Nearly $24 million in suspected fraud moved through Tor exit nodes over 13 years while most banks filing the reports did not know the traffic was Tor at all, and researcher Nicholas Weaver notes that blocking Tor outright does little lasting good because attackers have many other easy ways to hide their source address.

Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗

Topics
Data Breaches
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