Dread Pirate Sunk By Leaky CAPTCHA
Summary: Court documents released Friday in the Silk Road case say federal investigators located the hidden-service servers because the site's login page used a CAPTCHA that pulled content from the open Internet, leaking an IP address not associated with any known Tor node. Investigators typed that address into an ordinary browser and got part of the Silk Road login screen, indicating the code behind the login interface was not properly configured for Tor.
Why it matters: The anonymity of a Tor hidden service held only as long as every component on the server was configured for Tor; one third-party CAPTCHA embedded in a login page was enough to expose the true IP address to anyone watching the traffic.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
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