Russian government hired people to hack the Tor browser – but they failed

A company hired by the Russian Interior Ministry to identify users of the Tor network, an anonymous Internet browser, has announced its plans to terminate its state contract without finishing the task.

According to the Russian business daily Kommersant, the Russian Interior Ministry signed a series of contracts in 2013 and in 2014 with a company called “the Central Scientific Institute for Economics, IT and Management Systems” (CSI EIM) to study and to fight online anonymity. One of the agreements, under the code name “TOR (Flot),” involved studying how to retrieve information about Tor users and investigating what technologies Tor uses.