The NHTCU agents systematically visited each of the sites and made a list of those dedicated to child pornography. To that end, they wrote a web crawler that scoured the Dark Net, collecting all the Tor onion addresses it could find. Agents at the National High Tech Crime Unit of the Netherlands’ national police force had decided to crack down on online child porn, according to an FBI affidavit. Operation Torpedo began with an investigation in the Netherlands in August 2011. The FBI debuted its own solution in 2012, in an investigation dubbed “Operation Torpedo,” whose contours are only now becoming visible through court filings. But let’s have an informed debate about it.” “If Congress decides this is a technique that’s perfectly appropriate, maybe that’s OK. “This is such a big leap, there should have been congressional hearings about this,” says ACLU technologist Chris Soghoian, an expert on law enforcement’s use of hacking tools. Critics also worry about mission creep, the weakening of a technology relied on by human rights workers and activists, and the potential for innocent parties to wind up infected with government malware because they visited the wrong website. But it’s also engendering controversy, with charges that the Justice Department has glossed over the bulk-hacking technique when describing it to judges, while concealing its use from defendants. The approach has borne fruit-over a dozen alleged users of Tor-based child porn sites are now headed for trial as a result. For the last two years, the FBI has been quietly experimenting with drive-by hacks as a solution to one of law enforcement’s knottiest Internet problems: how to identify and prosecute users of criminal websites hiding behind the powerful Tor anonymity system. Now the technique is being adopted by a different kind of a hacker-the kind with a badge.

It’s one of the most powerful tools in the black hat arsenal, capable of delivering thousands of fresh victims into a hackers’ clutches within minutes. Security experts call it a “drive-by download”: a hacker infiltrates a high-traffic website and then subverts it to deliver malware to every single visitor.

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