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Does the US have a competent cyber-crime division that can handle stuff like this?

Quite the opposite. Our government at least appears to work very hard to make sure these attack venues remain wide open.

Yes, the FBI. They're fantastic at it and part of their job is helping businesses recover from compromise and going after the attackers. However, they're overworked government employees with not enough resources.

I think they very much want to, but what can you do if all of your IPs lead to tor exit nodes?

From what I've heard, the FBI will collect a whole bunch of information and then sit on their hands because of the above reason.

How can tor nodes be used for that?

Tor exposes a SOCKS interface, you can't control TCP/IP with the level of detail needed to perform these attacks.

Run the attack itself from a botnet of hacked computers, with the command and control server proxied behind TOR.

Naive response:

FBI can probably monitor both sides of those nodes (tap the data centre?) if they're in USA? So can't they monitor all the nodes clients, then do something like block returning traffic and look for timing or other meta data of the re-request from the command server?

Anyone tell me how reasonable that is?

> overworked government employees

An oxymoron ?

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