New theories have emerged about how German authorities cracked the anonymity of a darknet criminal website admin in 2021, exposing a major vulnerability in Tor’s privacy network. While authorities haven’t released their secrets on how this was conducted, a September 2024 report speculates that they used timing analysis and compromised servers to successfully trace the IP of “Andres G,” the alleged operator of “Boystown,” a darknet site for child pornography. Tor itself admits that it is unaware of the exact method but suspects the German authorities’ operation leveraged an outdated chat messen…