Hello my fellow relay operators,
It doesn't seem like there's any malicious intent, maybe a bit of schizophrenia perhaps, but I've reached back out simply asking if he has any proof of anything actually going on just to appease my own curiosity.
(…)
I have no further comment about this.
Thanks, Zachary.
Per the principle of not giving exposure, I avoided posting a message. After all, all of us are going to receive it. My only concern was, that perhaps only I got the email. Making that some weird kind of a phishing attack. Now it’s clear that’s not the case.
It seems that the person harvested emails and indiscriminately spammed everybody: the recipients list contains @torproject.org too.
I agree regarding this not being malicious. However. If we’re wrong, I see two options to be cautious about. It may be FUD against Tor: the network or the project. With the goal of either discouraging participation or presenting us to other observers as not caring. Or it may be an attempt to collect data on relay operators. What kind, I can’t tell, but this is the kind of message that triggers xkcd 386 and engaging in a mail exchange.
Cheers, keep relaying and carry on
···
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A couple of days ago, on 2025-02-06, an unknown family with 24 exit
relays showed up in the Tor network. We followed our usual approach[1]
in those cases: reaching out to the operator welcoming them in our
community while at the same time being cautious and keeping the relays
in a middleonly position until we know more about that large group.
It turns out that while this operator was using a different identity
this time, they are a known attacker that showed up as Zakwan Kalb on
our network previously. Some of you might remember them complaining
about their relays being banned from the network more than three years
ago and spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) after that,
including reaching out to some of you in private.[2] We heard they did
that again on the weekend, this time accusing the Tor Project of, among
other things, not allowing a random person to run relays and that the
Tor network is run entirely by people chosen by us. Moreover, they
alluded to us running a possible end-to-end confirmation attack in the
Tor network itself.
None of those claims is correct and, therefore, please ignore that email
in case you got it.
Moreover, such FUD tactics are to be expected by adversaries that try to
harm the Tor network and who are confronted with the day-to-day work the
network-health and community teams together with relay operators and
directory authorities are doing to keep the network safe.
A strong community is a good remedy against those attempts to disrupt
our network and project. Thus, let's stay vigilant and build trust in
each other, and keep those bad actors we find out of the network.
On Mon, Feb 10, 2025 at 11:20:44AM +0100, mpan via tor-relays wrote:
> Hello my fellow relay operators,
> It doesn't seem like there's any malicious intent, maybe a bit of schizophrenia perhaps, but I've reached back out simply asking if he has any proof of anything actually going on just to appease my own curiosity.
> (…)
> I have no further comment about this.
Thanks, Zachary.
Per the principle of not giving exposure, I avoided posting a message.
After all, all of us are going to receive it. My only concern was, that
perhaps only I got the email. Making that some weird kind of a phishing
attack. Now it’s clear that’s not the case.
It seems that the person harvested emails and indiscriminately spammed
everybody: the recipients list contains @torproject.org too.
I agree regarding this not being malicious. However. If we’re wrong, I see
two options to be cautious about. It may be FUD against Tor: the network or
the project. With the goal of either discouraging participation or
presenting us to other observers as not caring. Or it may be an attempt to
collect data on relay operators. What kind, I can’t tell, but this is the
kind of message that triggers xkcd 386 and engaging in a mail exchange.
Cheers, keep relaying and carry on
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To unsubscribe send an email to tor-relays-leave@lists.torproject.org