Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

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Anonymizing proxy relay services
the most notable being the use of IP spoofing and anonymizing proxy relay services. 
These are discussed in the following.
IP SPOOFING
IP spoofing is a process whereby a malicious hacker manually crafts data packets 
with a false source IP address. This not only hides their true IP address but also al-
lows them to impersonate another system. The limitation is that it cannot be used in 
an attack which relies on a return communication from the victim to the attacker, for 
example, to take control of or view data from, the victim’s machine. As a result it is a 
popular attack method for denial of service attacks which render a system inoperable 
by either overwhelming the system with a large quantity of packets, or by specifically 
crafting a packet which causes the service to terminate.
ANONYMIZING PROXY RELAY SERVICES
Anonymizing proxy relay services, such as 
Tor (2014)
, offer privacy and anonym-
ity of origination. This is achieved by a using encryption and a relaying algorithm 
respectively. The Tor algorithm selects a random path from the source to destination 
via specific network nodes that have chosen by a supporting community to form part 
of the relay service. The connections between these nodes are encrypted in such a 
way that each node only has the IP address of the nodes it is immediately connected 
to. While the communication between the exit node and the final destination is not 
encrypted the original source IP address is still guarded behind multiple layers of en-
cryption, one for each node. The final destination will only be aware of the IP address 
of the exit or final node used by the service, not the originating host of the message. 
This means if the logs of a server which has been compromised are examined; they 
will not reveal the details of an attacker using Tor, but rather the exit node of the Tor 
relay.
While proxy relay services such as Tor offer malicious hackers anti-surveillance 
and anonymity of origination, they also carry some drawbacks. Firstly they are slower 
than using the Internet conventionally; this is due to the additional nodes traversed 
(three in the case of Tor). These nodes can be in different countries and of poor qual-
ity and thus both the route and throughput becomes suboptimal. Second they can be 
difficult to configure, this is especially true if connectivity is not required through a 
web browser, as is the case with Internet Relay Chat (IRC), which although becoming 
less popular with the general public continues to remain a communication channel for 
malicious hackers. Lastly, they rely on the malicious party remembering to engage the 
service before each and every malicious operation, they only to need to forget on one 
occasion for their identity to be compromised. This is widely believed to have been 
the principal method by which Hector Xavier Monsegur, otherwise known as Sabu, 
from the hacking fraternity LulzSec was identified in 2011. He allegedly logged into 

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