[tor-talk] On the Theory of Remailers

[David H. Lipman]

From: "Moritz Bartl" <moritz at torservers.net>

> On 07.01.2013 21:53, David H. Lipman wrote:
>>> I'm hoping this will be of interest to this list.  To encourage
>>> interest in the waning art of remailers, I'm starting what I aim to be
>>> a long series on how they work, design choices, technical limitations,
>>> and attacks.  The first five are now live at https://crypto.is/blog/
>> I hope you fully elaborate on how remailers are used for abuse.
>
> Without being racial, sounds like an "American idea" to me, similar to
> crazy Disclaimers on almost every product. If every system ever invented
> would come with an elaboration on how it is being abused (hey, that's in
> the name, AB-USE) that list would most likely be illegal for most things
> (because assisting crime is illegal in most places) and otherwise very
> tiresome.

I'm afraid you are as YOU state "sounds like an "American idea" to me"...


> If you are looking for studies on abuse of remailer technology, no
> larger instance so far bothers to collect figures. Same for Tor. How
> could Tom know?
>
> Yes, this is indeed a sad state. Everything and everyone needs more open
> data.
>
> As one data point, unlikely to be of relevance for neither Tor nor
> remailers: We run both, and judging from a comparison of bandwidth
> consumption or passed messages vs. abuse complaints (because that's all
> I can take into account): widely below one percent. That's my rough
> estimate -- sorry, I would like to have better statistics but I
> currently don't. Are there any on "general abusive Internet traffic"?
> What is that? In the case of remailers, it's additionally hard because
> of all the dummy traffic.
>
> Also, in the end all abuse statistics can and always will be only about
> "reported abuse", not actual abuse.
>

I am not basing it on abuse complaints, I am basing it based upon viewed 
abuse.  I have been on Usenet a long time and I often see remailers used to 
post abuse to Usenet.  I have seen personal attack campaigns using numerous 
systems to perform the attacks such as;  dizum.com, remailer.privacy.at, 
remailer.paranoici.org and anonymitaet-im-inter.net to name a few.  Te 
systems were used for privacy b ut were used tol obfuscate one's identity 
whiles committing the abuse of an individual or on Usenet as a whole.

BTW:  Since you have www.torsewrvers.net in your signature, I will also add 
that I have seen Usenet abuse through that system as well.

The following is an example of a very recent spam campaign
Message-ID: <3f25c5add3e59183593b48fcca0bb65c at foto.ro1.torservers.net>



-- 
Dave
Multi-AV Scanning Tool - http://multi-av.thespykiller.co.uk
http://www.pctipp.ch/downloads/dl/35905.asp