The Federal Bureau of Investigation took advantage of an apparent flaw in the security of Mozilla’s browser, Firefox, and hacked into the system. The FBI hacked the system, they say, because they were conducting an investigation into a website that traffics in child pornography.
Mozilla found this unacceptable and filed a lawsuit on Wednesday in Tacoma, Washington against the FBI. The Tor browser, a Firefox product, allows users to surf the web in an anonymous manner in that their browsing is unable to be tracked. Apparently, though, the FBI found a vulnerability in Tor’s security system and hacked directly into it.
Last February, the FBI literally hijacked and possessed a child pornography site called Playpen and ran it and operated it for nearly a month. The site had been running on Tor but the FBI hacked the system and took over the Playpen site. The FBI was looking to track the IP addresses of anyone who signed on to the Playpen site that they had taken over in an attempt to entrap as many users as possible.
Mozilla had suspected a code problem with the browser but stated that no one really knows about it and have demanded how the FBI managed to find it and exploit it. The judge in the case has said that the security and code flaw has to be revealed to the lawyer’s of one of the case’s defendants but to no one else who might be able to remedy the situation and actually fix the flaw.
Mozilla desperately wants an opportunity to close up the security hole before it becomes general knowledge but it may just be too late for that. There are 137 defendants in the FBI’s child pornography case. It doesn’t, however, look too good for the FBI because some of the defendants have already been freed because of the FBI’s misuse of search warrants. The court ruled that the FBI search warrants were not legitimate and were therefore invalid against the defendants.
PHOTO CREDIT: PCWorld