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MITRE ATT&CK® Tool

S0183: Tor

Tor is a software suite and network that provides increased anonymity on the Internet. It creates a multi-hop proxy network and utilizes multilayer encryption to protect both the message and routing information. Tor utilizes "Onion Routing," in which messages are encrypted with multiple layers of encryption; at each step in the proxy network, the topmost layer is decrypted and the contents forwarded on to the next node until it reaches its destination. [1]

EnterpriseS0183ToolObject v1.5 Modified
Glexia's Take

Analyst context for executives and security teams

Analyst confidence Medium

Tor is legitimate anonymity software, but in ATT&CK it matters because adversaries can use it to hide where command-and-control or other network activity is really coming from. For leaders, the issue is not “Tor is bad” by itself; it is whether the organization can distinguish approved privacy use from suspicious use that obscures source attribution, incident scoping, and response decisions across Windows, macOS, and Linux environments.

Executive priority

Prioritize Tor as a visibility and policy question: do business units have a legitimate reason to use anonymizing networks, and can security teams prove when Tor-related traffic is allowed, blocked, or investigated? ATT&CK relationships connect Tor to multiple campaigns and groups, including espionage, ransomware/data extortion, and destructive or infrastructure-focused activity, so unresolved Tor visibility can slow incident response, audit evidence collection, and executive decision-making during high-risk events.

Technical view

Tor is mapped to Multi-hop Proxy (T1090.003) and Asymmetric Cryptography (T1573.002), both under command-and-control in the supplied relationship context. SOC and IR teams should validate whether endpoint, proxy, firewall, DNS, and network telemetry can identify Tor client use, connections to known Tor infrastructure, unusual encrypted outbound sessions, and policy exceptions. Because MITRE provides no official detection text for this object, detection engineering should be environment-specific and should account for legitimate privacy, research, or security-testing use.

Likely telemetry

  • Endpoint process and command-line activity on Windows, macOS, and Linux for Tor-related software execution where collected
  • Network connection metadata for outbound encrypted sessions and proxy-like behavior
  • Firewall, secure web gateway, and proxy logs showing access to Tor-related infrastructure or denied/allowed anonymizer categories
  • DNS resolver logs for Tor-related domains or bootstrap activity where applicable
  • Asset and user context to determine whether Tor use is authorized, expected, or anomalous

Detection direction

  • Start with policy-backed detection: alert differently on unauthorized Tor use, newly observed Tor activity, and Tor activity from sensitive systems.
  • Correlate Tor indicators with the related ATT&CK behaviors: multi-hop proxying and encrypted command-and-control, rather than relying on a single blocklist hit.
  • Tune for false positives from legitimate privacy use, security research, journalism, or sanctioned testing if those apply in the environment.
  • Validate coverage across all supplied Tor platforms: Linux, Windows, and macOS.
  • Review blind spots where TLS inspection is unavailable, endpoint telemetry is weak, DNS is bypassed, or egress logs lack user and asset attribution.

Mitigation priorities

  • Define and approve a business policy for anonymizing network software and document any authorized exceptions.
  • Restrict or monitor unauthorized Tor use through egress controls, proxy policy, firewall rules, and endpoint controls where operationally appropriate.
  • Improve outbound traffic visibility so SOC teams can associate suspicious encrypted or proxy traffic with users, hosts, and business processes.
  • For high-value systems, prioritize tighter egress control and faster IR triage for unexpected Tor-related activity.
  • Include Tor-related evidence requirements in incident response playbooks and compliance/audit artifacts, especially where investigations depend on proving network path, user context, and data movement risk.
Analyst notes and limits

The ATT&CK object describes Tor as an anonymity network using multi-hop proxying and layered encryption. Relationship data links it to Multi-hop Proxy and Asymmetric Cryptography techniques and to multiple campaigns and groups, including CostaRicto, Operation Wocao, FLORAHOX Activity, Salesforce Data Exfiltration, 2025 Poland Wiper Attacks, APT28, APT29, Leviathan, Scattered Spider, INC Ransom, and Water Galura. These relationships support prioritizing visibility and response readiness, but they do not by themselves prove malicious activity in any local environment.

MITRE does not provide official detection guidance for this object, and the object has no specified tactics of its own. This take therefore avoids claiming guaranteed detection or active exploitation and depends on local policy, telemetry quality, asset criticality, and business-approved Tor use to determine severity.

Official MITRE ATT&CK definition

Tor

Tor is a software suite and network that provides increased anonymity on the Internet. It creates a multi-hop proxy network and utilizes multilayer encryption to protect both the message and routing information. Tor utilizes "Onion Routing," in which messages are encrypted with multiple layers of encryption; at each step in the proxy network, the topmost layer is decrypted and the contents forwarded on to the next node until it reaches its destination. [1]

View the same entry on attack.mitre.org (MITRE-hosted reference; in-page links above use the Glexia ATT&CK library.)

Glexia analysis

How security teams should use this page

Treat this object as behavior context, not an attribution claim. Validate the related groups, software, data sources, and mitigations against official ATT&CK relationships and your own telemetry before making control-coverage decisions.

ATT&CK relationship table

Techniques used

This mirrors the MITRE pattern of making group, software, campaign, and technique relationships scannable. Relationship notes come from mirrored ATT&CK relationship text when available.

2 rows
Domain ID Name Relationship / procedure
Enterprise T1573.002 Asymmetric Cryptography Sub-technique

Tor encapsulates traffic in multiple layers of encryption, using TLS by default.CitationDingledine Tor The Second-Generation Onion Router

Enterprise T1090.003 Multi-hop Proxy Sub-technique

Traffic traversing the Tor network will be forwarded to multiple nodes before exiting the Tor network and continuing on to its intended destination.CitationDingledine Tor The Second-Generation Onion Router

Associated objects

Groups, software, and campaigns

Group Enterprise

G1015: Scattered Spider

Scattered Spider is a native English-speaking cybercriminal group active since at least 2022. [1] [2] The group initially targeted customer relationship management (CRM) providers, business process outsourcing (BPO) firms, and telecommunications and technology companies before expanding in 2023 to gaming, hospitality, retail, managed service provider (MSP), manufacturing, and financial sectors. [2] Scattered Spider relies heavily on social engineering, including impersonating IT and help-desk staff, to gain initial access, bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA), and compromise enterprise networks. The group has adapted its tooling to evade endpoint detection and response (EDR) defenses and used ransomware for financial gain. [3] [4] [5] Scattered Spider had expanded into hybrid cloud and identity environments, using help-desk impersonation and MFA bypass to obtain administrator access in Okta, AWS, and Office 365. [6]

Group Enterprise

G0007: APT28

APT28 is a threat group that has been attributed to Russia's General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) 85th Main Special Service Center (GTsSS) military unit 26165.[1][2] This group has been active since at least 2004.[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]

APT28 reportedly compromised the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2016 in an attempt to interfere with the U.S. presidential election.[5] In 2018, the US indicted five GRU Unit 26165 officers associated with APT28 for cyber operations (including close-access operations) conducted between 2014 and 2018 against the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the US Anti-Doping Agency, a US nuclear facility, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the Spiez Swiss Chemicals Laboratory, and other organizations.[14] Some of these were conducted with the assistance of GRU Unit 74455, which is also referred to as Sandworm Team.

Group Enterprise

G0016: APT29

APT29 is threat group that has been attributed to Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).[1][2] They have operated since at least 2008, often targeting government networks in Europe and NATO member countries, research institutes, and think tanks. APT29 reportedly compromised the Democratic National Committee starting in the summer of 2015.[3][4][5][6]

In April 2021, the US and UK governments attributed the SolarWinds Compromise to the SVR; public statements included citations to APT29, Cozy Bear, and The Dukes.[7][8] Industry reporting also referred to the actors involved in this campaign as UNC2452, NOBELIUM, StellarParticle, Dark Halo, and SolarStorm.[9][10][11][12][13][14]

Group Enterprise

G1050: Water Galura

Water Galura are the operators of the Qilin Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) who handle payload generation, ransom negotiations, and the publication of stolen data for Qilin affilates recruited on Russian cybercrime forums. Water Galura have been active since at least 2022 and use a double extortion model where they demand payment for providing decryption keys and for refraining from publishing the stolen data to their leak site.[1][2]

Group Enterprise

G0065: Leviathan

Leviathan is a Chinese state-sponsored cyber espionage group that has been attributed to the Ministry of State Security's (MSS) Hainan State Security Department and an affiliated front company.[1] Active since at least 2009, Leviathan has targeted the following sectors: academia, aerospace/aviation, biomedical, defense industrial base, government, healthcare, manufacturing, maritime, and transportation across the US, Canada, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.[1][2][3][4]

Campaign Enterprise

C0053: FLORAHOX Activity

FLORAHOX Activity is conducted using a hybrid operational relay box (ORB) network, which combines two types of infrastructure: compromised devices and leased Virtual Private Servers (VPS). The compromised devices include end-of-life routers and IoT devices, while VPS space is commercially leased and managed by ORB network administrators. This hybrid ORB network allows adversaries to proxy and obscure malicious traffic, making the source of the traffic more difficult to trace.

The FLORAHOX ORB network has been leveraged by multiple cyber threat actors, including China-nexus actors like ZIRCONIUM. These adversaries conduct espionage campaigns through FLORAHOX Activity, relying on the ORB network's ability to funnel traffic through Tor nodes, provisioned VPS servers, and compromised routers to obfuscate malicious traffic.[1]

Campaign Enterprise

C0014: Operation Wocao

Operation Wocao was a cyber espionage campaign that targeted organizations around the world, including in Brazil, China, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The suspected China-based actors compromised government organizations and managed service providers, as well as aviation, construction, energy, finance, health care, insurance, offshore engineering, software development, and transportation companies.[1]

Security researchers assessed the Operation Wocao actors used similar TTPs and tools as APT20, suggesting a possible overlap. Operation Wocao was named after an observed command line entry by one of the threat actors, possibly out of frustration from losing webshell access.[1]

Campaign Enterprise

C0004: CostaRicto

CostaRicto was a suspected hacker-for-hire cyber espionage campaign that targeted multiple industries worldwide, with a large number being financial institutions. CostaRicto actors targeted organizations in Europe, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Africa, with a large concentration in South Asia (especially India, Bangladesh, and Singapore), using custom malware, open source tools, and a complex network of proxies and SSH tunnels.[1]

Campaign Enterprise

C0063: 2025 Poland Wiper Attacks

2025 Poland Wiper Attacks is a Russian state-sponsored campaign that conducted destructive cyberattacks against Polish energy infrastructure in December 2025. Targets included more than 30 wind and photovoltaic farms, a combined heat and power (CHP) plant, and a manufacturing sector company. The attacks on the distributed energy resources (DER) disrupted communications between affected facilities and the distribution system operator, but did not impact electricity generation or heat supply. Across the campaign, threat actors deployed two previously undocumented wiper tools, DynoWiper, a Windows-based wiper and LazyWiper, a PowerShell wiper, distributed via malicious Group Policy Objects. At the CHP plant, threat actors had maintained access since at least March 2025, using that foothold to obtain credentials and move laterally before attempting wiper deployment. Some reporting has assessed the activity to be consistent with Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) threat activity group Dragonfly, also tracked as STATIC TUNDRA, while other reporting attributes the destructive wiper activities to the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) threat activity group ELECTRUM, also tracked as Sandworm Team.[1][2][3][4]

Campaign Enterprise

C0059: Salesforce Data Exfiltration

The Salesforce Data Exfiltration campaign began in October 2024 with financially-motivated threat actor UNC6040 using Spearphishing Voice (vishing) to compromise corporate Salesforce instances for large-scale data theft and extortion. Following the initial data theft, victim organizations received extortion demands from a separate threat actor, UNC6240, who claimed to be the “ShinyHunters” group. The observed infrastructure and TTPs used during the Salesforce Data Exfiltration campaign overlap with those used by threat groups with suspected ties to the broader collective known as "The Com.” These overlaps could plausibly be the result of associated actors operating within the same communities and are not necessarily an indication of a direct operational relationship.[1][2]

Relationship explorer

All related ATT&CK context

Change history

Object version and sync metadata

The fields below describe the current mirrored snapshot. When Glexia retains multiple ATT&CK source imports, you can open the table to compare the same object across releases (hashes and MITRE timestamps). For MITRE’s own release notes and roadmap, see ATT&CK resources — Updates .

ATT&CK release
19.1
Object version
1.5
Created
Modified
Raw hash
5bdc86348a52a07b...
Imported snapshots across ATT&CK releases (1)
Release Bundle imported Object version Modified Status Raw hash
19.1 1.5 Current bundle 5bdc86348a52…
Raw source

Mirrored ATT&CK source object

The raw object is retained through the mirrored ATT&CK source bundle and object hash. The raw endpoint returns the exact object from the mirrored bundle when available.

Source references

External references and citations

MITRE external references are preserved separately from Glexia analysis so citations remain traceable to their original source records.

  1. [1]
    Dingledine Tor The Second-Generation Onion Router

    Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson and Paul Syverson. (2004). Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router. Retrieved December 21, 2017.

    Open source URL
  2. [2]
    Tor

    (Citation: Dingledine Tor The Second-Generation Onion Router)

  3. [3]
    mitre-attack S0183
    Open source URL
Source and licensing

Source: MITRE ATT&CK®. © 2026 The MITRE Corporation. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of The MITRE Corporation. MITRE ATT&CK and ATT&CK are registered trademarks of The MITRE Corporation. Glexia is not affiliated with or endorsed by MITRE.