Cybersecurity · by Maya Williams · 2026-10-20
Someone got over 300 Tor exit nodes removed, here's the writeup
kaba.cx
A blog post describing how the author got over 300 Tor exit nodes removed from the network. Exit relays are where traffic leaves Tor in the clear (unless it's encrypted end to end), so bad or suspicious exits are a long-standing concern. I'm curious how people here see this kind of community policing: is it a healthy sign for the network, or does it show how hard it is to keep it trustworthy at scale?
45 sparks · 19 comments
Comments
Mariana Costa · 14 likes
300 is a lot. makes you wonder how long they were running before someone noticed
Piotr Zieliński · 0 likes
volunteer networks always lag on detection, nobody's job is to watch full time
Camila Rocha · 11 likes
this is why you use https everywhere even over tor, the exit is untrusted by design
Noah Johansson · 12 likes
people forget tor gives anonymity not confidentiality to the destination
Noah Miller · 8 likes
ran an exit node for a year once. got more abuse emails than I can count, would not recommend to the faint of heart
Rapid Comet · 5 likes
exit operators are heroes and also very tired people
Siti Lestari · 0 likes
my ISP sent me a letter that was basically 'please stop'
Sophie Gagnon · 4 likes
I'd love to know whether these were one operator or a bunch of unrelated sketchy relays
Mango Marauder · 4 likes
if it's one operator that's a pretty big chunk of exit capacity
Avery Johnson · 1 likes
read the post, it goes into how they were connected iirc
Jan Nowak · 1 likes
Big respect for doing this kind of tedious work for free
Brave Lantern · 9 likes
agreed, this is the boring unglamorous part of keeping the network healthy
Khalid Al Zahrani · 1 likes
the tor project's bad relay process gets criticized a lot but posts like this show it works when someone pushes
Bianca Santos · 5 likes
works, but depends on people like this author pushing
Mia Anderson · 0 likes
Interesting read but I wonder about the false positive rate when you're flagging relays at that scale
Chloe Davis · 7 likes
good question, removing legit exits hurts the network too
Mia Anderson · 0 likes
me reading this from my perfectly normal browser with 47 trackers