[tor-talk] Many more Tor users in the past week?

adrelanos adrelanos at riseup.net
Tue Sep 3 15:35:04 UTC 2013


New hypothesis:
This is an attempt to shut down the Tor network once and forever.

Might this be an attack on the Tor network with the goal to make it that
slow for everyone, that no one will use it anymore? (DDOS)

Doing this using a botnet and only taking up a portion of their
individual botnet member's bandwidth?

If the botnet owner would force their botnet members to use all of their
bandwith, the DDOS attack would be more effective in the short run, but
the owner of the infected computer might notice it much easier and clean
its computer. Using only a negligible part of their botnet member's
bandwidth ensures that unwanted connections go unnoticed for a very long
time, thus making this not a short successful DDOS attack, but an ever
lasting one.

Roger Dingledine:
> Check out
> https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html

Even more users. And counting. I think now it's very unlikely that this
is a natural growth of real users. If that was the case, you could see
lots of discussion/support questions from those new Tor users or users
of software which uses Tor.

> There's a slight increase (worsening) in the performance measurements:
> https://metrics.torproject.org/performance.html

Got even worse.


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