Tor hidden services have addresses ending in the “.onion” suffix. The trouble is, precisely what makes it an attractive proposition for those people also makes it an attractive proposition for the bad guys. Dissidents in repressive regimes, anonymous press sources, whistleblowers, activists, and the military all use Tor for legitimate reasons.

It’s not all illegal activity on the Tor network, however. The Tor network forms a large part of the dark web. It is the strength of that anonymity that has lead to the Tor network being used to host many web sites that engage in criminal activity. This “bouncing” is another reason Tor makes it virtually impossible to back-track and identify the person at the far end. The Tor relays intentionally bounce your connection between multiple relays, even if that routing is not required to reach your destination. The regular routing and switching elements of the internet cannot work with Tor network traffic.Ī network of Tor relays, hosted and maintained by volunteers, performs the switching and routing instead. Whilst this helps preserve the anonymity of the people using it, the encryption causes a networking problem. The traffic that passes along the Tor network is encrypted. With Tor, if you use it effectively, no one can trace your activity back to your IP address. It provides anonymity and privacy to users. The Tor ( The Onion Router) network is one such overlay network. Overlay networks also make use of the internet.

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