From the Tor blog:
On July 4 2014 we found a group of relays that we assume were trying to deanonymize users. They appear to have been targeting people who operate or access Tor hidden services. The attack involved modifying Tor protocol headers to do traffic confirmation attacks.
The attacking relays joined the network on January 30 2014, and we removed them from the network on July 4. While we don’t know when they started doing the attack, users who operated or accessed hidden services from early February through July 4 should assume they were affected.
Read more on Tor. In light of the Black Hat talk that was cancelled amidst much controversy and discussion about responsible disclosure, the Tor blog asks:
Q1) Was this the Black Hat 2014 talk that got canceled recently?
Q2) Did we find all the malicious relays?
Q3) Did the malicious relays inject the signal at any points besides the HSDir position?
Q4) What data did the attackers keep, and are they going to destroy it? How have they protected the data (if any) while storing it?Great questions. We spent several months trying to extract information from the researchers who were going to give the Black Hat talk, and eventually we did get some hints from them about how “relay early” cells could be used for traffic confirmation attacks, which is how we started looking for the attacks in the wild. They haven’t answered our emails lately, so we don’t know for sure, but it seems likely that the answer to Q1 is “yes”. In fact, we hope they *were* the ones doing the attacks, since otherwise it means somebody else was. We don’t yet know the answers to Q2, Q3, or Q4.