Visit the Wrong Website, and the FBI Could End Up in Your Computer
Security experts call it a “drive-by download”: a hacker infiltrates a high-traffic website and then subverts it to deliver malware to every single visitor. For the last two years, the FBI has been quietly experimenting with drive-by hacks as a solution to one of law enforcement’s knottiest Internet problems: how to identify and prosecute users of criminal websites hiding behind the powerful Tor anonymity system. “This is such a big leap, there should have been congressional hearings about this,” says ACLU technologist Chris Soghoian, an expert on law enforcement’s use of hacking tools. The bureau calls the method an NIT, for “network investigative technique,” and the FBI has been using it since at least 2002 in cases ranging from computer hacking to bomb threats, child porn to extortion. It achieves that by accepting connections from the public Internet—the “clearnet”—encrypting the traffic and bouncing it through a winding series of computers before dumping it back on the web through any of over 1,100 “exit nodes.” The system also supports so-called hidden services—special websites, with addresses ending in.onion, whose physical locations are theoretically untraceable.
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