A search reveals the address used in an attack on Tor users’ privacy referenced an IP address belonging to the NSA, routed through SAIC. Malware planted on the servers of Freedom Hosting — the “hidden service” hosting provider on the Tor anonymized network brought down late last week—may have de-anonymized visitors to the sites running on that service. This issue could send identifying information about site visitors to an Internet Protocol address that was hard-coded into the script the malware injected into browsers. And it appears the IP address in question belongs to the National Security Agency (NSA). This revelation comes from analysis done collaboratively by Baneki Privacy Labs , a collective of Internet security researchers, and VPN provider Cryptocloud . When the IP address was uncovered in the JavaScript exploit —which specifically targets Firefox Long-Term Support version 17, the version included in Tor Browser Bundle—a source at Baneki told Ars that he and others reached out to the malware and security community to help identify the source. The exploit attacked a vulnerability in the Windows version of the Firefox Extended Support Release  17 browser —the one used previously in the Tor Project’s Tor Browser Bundle (TBB).  That vulnerability had been patched by Mozilla in June, and the updated browser is now part of TBB. But the TBB configuration of Firefox doesn’t include automatic security updates, so users of the bundle would not have been protected if they had not recently upgraded. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Update: Researchers say Tor-targeted malware phoned home to NSA