Spyware tracks child sex abuse site users Published duration 1 December 2016

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Hidden code that tracked visitors to a child sex abuse image website has been discovered by its members.

The script in the site targeted visitors using the anonymising web browser Tor and sent information about their computers to a server in France.

The code may have been written by a law enforcement agency and there are fears it could have been used on other sites to track law-abiding people.

An update to the Tor browser has disabled the tracker.

Tor is designed to let people access pages from the so-called dark web and browse free from surveillance.

But the hidden code in the illicit website exploited a security flaw in Tor to send user information back to a mysterious server in France.

media caption Technology explained: What is the dark web?

The vulnerability also affected the Mozilla's Firefox browser, on which Tor is based.

Technology news site Motherboard found online posts referring to the discovery of the tracking code on the child sex abuse website.

'Government hacking'

One user described the code as a network investigative technique (Nit), which can be used by law enforcement to help identify people browsing the web anonymously.

The website in question was shut down on 15 November.

The party behind the tracking code has not been identified, but one security researcher told news site Ars Technica that a majority of the code matched a script deployed by the FBI in 2013.

Daniel Veditz, security lead at Firefox-maker Mozilla, said in a blog : "The exploit in this case works in essentially the same way as the 'network investigative technique' used by [the] FBI to deanonymise Tor users.

"This similarity has led to speculation that this exploit was created by FBI or another law enforcement agency. As of now, we do not know whether this is the case.

"If this exploit was in fact developed and deployed by a government agency, the fact that it has been published and can now be used by anyone to attack Firefox users is a clear demonstration of how supposedly limited government hacking can become a threat to the broader web."

The security flaw has now been patched in both Firefox and Tor.