All the recent dark net arrests seem to be pretty vague on how the big bad was caught (except the IM admin’s silly opsec errors) In the article they say he clicked on a honeypot link, but how was his ip or any other identifier identified, why didnt tor protect him.
Obviously this guy in question was a pedophile and an active danger, but recently in my country a state passed a law that can get you arrested if you post anything the government doesnt like, so these tools are important and need to be bulletproof.
Does Tor have no protection against such a simple attack? I always thought any clearnet address i type in the browser (along with the dns query) hops 3 times.
The Tor network cannot protect against that, because the attack circumvents it. Certain tools, like the Tor browser, do have protection against it (as much as they can) when you use them correctly, but they cannot keep users from inadvertently opening a link in some other tool. Nor can they protect against other software on a user’s device, like a spyware keyboard or the OS provider working with law enforcement.
It’s unlikely that the Tor browser is configured as the default browser, so when you click the link, it will open in something else
Then doesn’t that mean that the guy was somehow shortlisted and handpicked to be served that honeypot link?
You can do DNS in multiple ways. The question is what you try to do, or what your software tries to do.
I can’t answer this with confidence, but I was thinking the link in the email opened in the default browser, which wasn’t Tor in their case. Or something in the email client perhaps. Ultimately, I have no idea what happened and I was just speculating