One third of TOR traffic is fraudulent

Iovation, the online reputation–tracking firm, found that 30.2 per cent of the transactions it logged as coming from the Tor network during the month of August were fraudulent.

Tor disguises surfers by shuttling connects through hard-to-follow network routes and assigning them IP addresses at random from a pool distributed around the globe. This makes it not only hard to know just who is behind any given connection, or even where in the world they are located.

That makes TOR a very attractive way for political activism, whistleblowing, and other risky but laudable activities. However, it is also attractive for drug dealing to child pornography.

As we reported earlier, the number of clients using the TOR network nearly doubled in August with the Mevade.A botnent.

Iovation found that nearly a third of all Tor transactions were suspect.

"Transactions simply means any online action at one of our customer sites like online purchases, account registrations, credit applications, logins, wire transfers, comments, etc," Scott Olson, Iovation's VP of product, said in an email. "Any interaction where fraud or abuse are of concern to our subscribers."

"Tor in itself isn't a bad service," Olson said. "It can be used for positive things as well as fraudulent things. For our clients, they are concerned with mitigating risk and in this case, Tor is disproportionately associated with a much higher fraud rate for online purchases, account applications, logins (through account takeovers), etc."