30 Percent of transactions conducted from Tor are fraudulent

iovation announced that 30.2 percent of transactions conducted from Tor (the onion router) in August were fraudulent. This compared with an overall fraud rate of 1 percent for all online transactions in August.

Tor is a privacy protocol that is intended to help people to browse the Internet anonymously. It does so by redirecting web traffic along hard-to-follow routes and assigning web users a random IP address that can change at any time. This helps to mask users’ true geolocations and the IP addresses of their Internet-connected devices.

According to Tor metrics, more than 1.5 million people use Tor every day as of early September 2013, up from 500,000 a day in early August 2013.

“Cybercriminals are always looking for ways to fly under the radar,” said Scott Waddell, Chief Technology Officer at iovation. “While Tor on its surface appears to be for the greater good, it is disproportionately used for fraudulent and abusive transactions. Of note, Tor use more than doubled in August, likely due to a massive botnet leveraging Tor for command and control communications.”

The fraud findings were produced by iovation by analyzing 240 million transactions conducted in August 2013 originating from the 1.5 billion devices it has in its device reputation database. Transactions utilizing Tor were identified by iovation by leveraging technology it developed to correlate transactions to IP addresses that are part of Tor.