Doesn't attempt to deanonymize Tor users happen almost everyday? But i wouldn't worry too much since the attack usually exploit human mistake or target specific people.
If you read the blog post I posted you will see that it's not just usual everyday deanonymization but much bigger scale operation happening recently, especially if we couple that with Russia trying to totally ban Tor.
Recently, Roskomnadzor has blocked several VPN services, determining the blocking that these services violate the laws of the Russian Federation.
Today, the site of the TOR browser was blocked.
Proton VPN and Nord VPN are also on that list and they are one of the bigger VPN services, so my question is how many VPN services now actually work in Russia and is there a way to work around this ban?
It is how freedom is broken in such countries: China, Russia, Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), Cuba, Vietnam. They are controlled by communist parties which claim to be parties for people but unfortunately what they say and what they do are totally different.
Sadly it's not just the case in those countries (Russia is not communist anymore btw
) and I think that global dictatorship is rising in all countries around the world.
We the people are majority and we can fight this tyranny together, but most people are probably busy looking at their screens and living their virtual lives :/
This is what seems to be the main motivation for BTCMITM20, as detailed in the referenced in the Medium post linked in the OP, although the scope is potentially wider in terms of deanonymizing it seems.
I think that few months ago Chipmixer was attacked with similar tactics of address replacement but this was on clear net if I remember correctly.
BTCMITM20 is driven by profit with stealing coins from people, but KAX17 is not related with that and this actor is only looking to mass deanonymize tor users and he is burning a lot of money in that process.
I do like the initiative though. If we want freedom, and the freedom to be anonymous, since there are definitely reasons to want to remain anonymous for legitimate reasons, mostly from web hosts collecting your data, run a node if possible. Just like Bitcoin, the more nodes we have the more secure the network is.
Yeah, only solution to fight this attacks is if more people run their Tor nodes and bridges, so that bigger numbers win.