According to IT security vendors Kaspersky Lab, the Tor anonymity network is under threat of being swamped by criminals abusing the anonymity it provides for hiding zombie networks, malicious command and control servers and ‘darknets’, Le Monde Informatique reports.

Tor – otherwise known as The Onion Router – has always had its dark side, but last year the network’s use by criminals seems to have grown appreciably. According to researcher Sergey Lozhkin, “Kaspersky Lab had uncovered evidence of 900 services using Tor, equivalent to 5,500 nodes (server relays) and 1,000 exit nodes (servers from which traffic emerges) in total.”

“It all started from the notorious Silk Road market and evolved into dozens of specialist markets: drugs, arms and, of course, malware.

“Carding shops are firmly established in the Darknet. Stolen personal info is for sale with a wide variety of search attributes like country, bank, etc. Offers for customers of this kind are not limited to credit cards. Dumps, skimmers and carding equipment are for sale too”, he added.

“In addition, command and control (C&C) servers hosted by Tor are more difficult to flush out, blacklist or eliminate,” Lozhkin continued. “Although creating a Tor communication module within a malware sample means extra work for the malware developers. We expect there will be a rise in new Tor-based malware, as well as Tor support for existing malware.”

Experts from Kaspersky Lab have so far found Zeus with Tor capabilities and then detected ChewBacca and finally analysed the first Tor Trojan for Android.

It was announced a few days ago that future versions of the open source Firefox browser could show advertising in freshly opened browser tabs (posts passim). To date these have shown up to nine thumbnails of frequently visited websites. However, on a newly installed browser these so-called ’tiles’ are blank and only fill up over time and with use. Heise writes that Mozilla Foundation boss Mitchell Baker has now justified the plans in a blog post.

In the past, Mozilla developers have always declined to display content with no previous user activity. Baker writes: ” This made sense at first when the web was so young. But over the years many people have come to expect and want their software to do things on their behalf, to take note of what one has done before and do something useful with it.”

She continues: “So we look at the Tiles and wonder if we can do more for people. We think we can. I’ve heard some people say they still don’t want any content offered. They want their experience to be new, to be the same as it was the day they installed the browser, the same as anyone else might experience. I understand this view, and think it’s not the default most people are choosing. We think we can offer people useful content in the Tiles.”

Baker promises that the advertisements shown in the tiles will definitely have no tracking functions. It’s ultimately a matter of gaining revenue for the Mozilla Foundation. The Foundation has so far survived mostly on funding from search engine companies like Google and other web companies. In 2012 these revenues amounted to more than $300 mn.