Dark Web Email Service SIGAINT hacked by the Intelligence

The Dark Web email service SIGAINT suffered a major attack that involved 70  exit nodes, a circumstance that suggests Government operation.

Law enforcement and Intelligence agencies are always involved in the infiltration of Darknets and related services with the primary intent to monitor bad actors and de-anonymize users.

The Tor-Based Dark Web Email Service SIGAINT is one of the services under constant attack of Government agencies, recently its administrator warned the users of the email service that was targeted by a suspected law enforcement agency who tried to hack it.

SIGAINT is one of the web email service hosted on the TOR network that is used to send messages preserving user’s anonymity.

Among the users of web email services hosted in the dark web, there are journalists, dissidents menaced by repressive regimes and of course intelligence agencies and cyber criminals.

Due to the nature of the service and the identity of its users, SIGAINT email service is one of those Tor hidden services targeted by the intelligence.

According to the Administrator, a persistent attacker with access to nearly 70 bad Tor exit nodes  (around 6 percent of the total) have tried to compromise the email service, the attack occurred a few days ago. The administrator of the anonymous web email service alerted the users via the tor-talk mailing list this week.

Tor Exit Nodes are the gateways where encrypted Tor traffic flows on the Internet, by monitoring an exit node it is possible to analyze the Tor traffic after it leaves the onion network.

In the specific case of web email services like SIGAINT, the Tor exit node is the last hop before the message reaches the Internet and its IP address is the unique information seen by the recipient instead the IP address of the legitimate sender.

One of the administrators of SIGAINT confirmed that his server was targeted by 58 malicious Tor exit nodes, but a member of the Tor Project, Philipp Winter, discovered other 12 bad exit nodes.

A so huge number of exit nodes compromised lead the experts to believe that involvement of an intelligence agency.

“So apparently we have drawn attention to our humble little email service that mostly lives inside of the Tor network. Today we reported 58 bad exit nodes to Philipp. He instantly found 12 more that we had missed, and there may be even more of them. (Thank you, Philipp!) FYI: They were added to the BadExit list just hours ago so traffic to them should dry up. The attacker had been trying various exploits against our infrastructure over the past few months. Our exploit mitigations have been sounding various alarms.” is reported in the tor-talk mailing list.

The managers of the Tor Project have blacklisted the bad Tor relays that were used by attackers to run”man in the middle” (MITM) attacks.

Which is the impact for the victims?

SIGAINT administrators speculate that the service was not compromised, but there is the concrete possibility that attackers have obtained credentials of an unknown number of users.

“We are confident that they didn’t get in,” states the alert. “It looks like they resorted to rewriting the .onion URL located on sigaint.org to one of theirs so they could MITM [man-in-the-middle] logins and spy in real-time.”

The administrator, who wishes to remain anonymous, told Motherboard that the hackers failed to break into SIGAINT’s servers.

“We know what they were after,” the admin told to Lorenzo Bicchierai at Motherboard. “There is no way to spy on email that doesn’t leave the darknet without spying on the mail service itself.”

The SIGAINT email web service is evaluating the possibility to enable encryption by default or remove the .onion URL from the sigaint.org page.

[adrotate banner=”9″]

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs –  SIGAINT, Deep Web)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

Recent Posts

Cisco addressed high-severity flaws in IOS and IOS XE software

Cisco addressed multiple vulnerabilities in IOS and IOS XE software that can be exploited to…

12 hours ago

Google: China dominates government exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities in 2023

Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and Mandiant reported a surge in the number of actively…

19 hours ago

Google addressed 2 Chrome zero-days demonstrated at Pwn2Own 2024

Google addressed two zero-day vulnerabilities in the Chrome web browser that have been demonstrated during…

1 day ago

INC Ransom stole 3TB of data from the National Health Service (NHS) of Scotland

The INC Ransom extortion group hacked the National Health Service (NHS) of Scotland and is threatening…

1 day ago

CISA adds Microsoft SharePoint bug disclosed at Pwn2Own to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds a Microsoft SharePoint vulnerability disclosed at the…

2 days ago

The DDR Advantage: Real-Time Data Defense

This is the advantage of Data Detection and Response (DDR) for organizations aiming to build…

2 days ago

This website uses cookies.