In November of 2016, EUROPOL law enforcement agency deployed a rare TOR browser exploit on the Darkweb in order to take down a child abuse site. The exploit was provided by a little known company named Exodus Intelligence. The CEO and owner of the company, Mr. Logan Brown stated why he provided such an exploit at such a risk to his own company. Mr. Brown stated “I wanted to help take a person down.” The TOR browser exploit was successful because it took advantage of a known Mozilla vulnerability. It was easy for the exploit to work because it used the same source code as the known vulnerability within The Firefox Mozilla browser. EUROPOL had been tracking the child abuse site known as “Giftbox” for a while. The site which was taken down immediately after the arrest of the site’s owner. The site is still being actively monitored by several law enforcement agencies. The exploit operation was reckless according to Mr. Brown. Because, despite all of the legal protections provided to the firm, the operation took a shotgun and grenade approach to the operation when it they released it on Mozilla through the TOR browser. Mozilla after being informed by Exodus Intelligence immediately developed and released a patch for the existing exploit. It was noted later that law enforcement didn’t care about being stealthy at all or even any of the clean up after the exploit was released. As long as they were able to capture the site owner and shutdown the site. Mr. Brown further stated that it was a very messy operation because law enforcement did not want to use the scalpel approach to catch the owner of the child abuse site.
Source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ceo-of-company-behind-tor-browser-exploit?utm_source=mbfb

By Randall Sylvertooth, MSc

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