Communications of the ACM
This Spy App Can See If You've Visited Whistleblowing Sites on the Dark Web
Worcester Polytechnic Institute researchers have developed spyware that determines whether online users have visited whistleblowing sites on the Dark Web.
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Researchers at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) have developed spyware that determines if online users have visited whistleblowing sites on the Dark Web.
The app tracks and analyzes usage patterns on a computer's processor. The WPI team found this process can be executed with malware running in the background on a person's machine.
The researchers employed Linux to access the required data, first tracking processor use with the app while browsing different sites in Chrome in Incognito mode, and then in the Tor Browser. The data was parsed by an artificial intelligence program, yielding a baseline for predicting which sites a user accessed.
Once it was trained, the program could analyze new hardware use patterns and anticipate with 86.3% accuracy whether a user had visited Netflix or Amazon via Chrome in Incognito mode. The algorithm inferred whistleblowing site visits via Tor with 84% accuracy.
From Motherboard
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