Is using Tor Harmful?

[Meet8939]

I was starting to learn Ethical Hacking and the one who is teaching in the video stated that using Tor is very helpful and informative. I wanted to use it but my brother started saying that it is very dangerous and could make our computer get some viruses or even hacked, so he made me not to install it. I am very curious that is what my brother told me true, i.e can my computer get damaged or even hacked by just using Tor? 

I was going to use it on my main machine but now I thought of using it on a virtual machine and would like to know the same answer for a Kali Linux OS on a virtual machine.

[Ansuex]

Tor itself is not the problem.

Using tor might potentially make you more interesting to look at as police. Since Tor is used a lot for drug sales and other illegal activity.

Also Tor is there to be anonymous, that is why alot of people use Tor in a virtual machine, without logging in to any place that has your personal information, that would defeat the purpose.  

[Underi]

Using tor isn't harmful. The whole idea is anonymity. Actually, the more users TOR has the better it works. Thing is, thanks to it's anonymity it is often used to sell drugs and other illegal material. You won't be hacked or damage your computer if you visit your traditional websites such as linustechtips.com or google.com, but that might be different for shady .onion sites. Also, Kali Linux is just like any other Linux distro, but pre-installed with common penetration testing software. It obviously has the potential to be harmful, but that depends on how you use it.

[InertiaSelling]

You will get viruses if you use it for nefarious purposes from a Windows machine, e.g browsing .onion pages about drugs, hacking, rape porn, slaves, weapons and so on. Indeed, it's even worse if you download things from said pages. If you're using Tor, you probably care about anonymity, which means you should probably use it from an amnesic operating system. Think of it as sleeping with a prostitute: no kissing, and don't forget to wear a condom.

 

There are so many keywords in this message. Pretty sure I'm on the NSA watchlist now.

[WereCatf]

I'd like to chime in that Tor isn't quite as trustworthy as the others make it out to be. There are many Tor-nodes that modify your traffic in order to try and slip malware to you, so it's a good idea not to download anything via Tor from non-SSL-secured sites, like e.g. FTP or plain HTTP.

[Sauron]

No, it's not - as long as you use your brain. Using it to connect to normal websites and legal platforms is not a problem, and in that case Tor is only helpful as it tries to protect your privacy (at the cost of a few conveniences like cookies). If, instead, you go looking for illegal hidden services, then you're just begging to be scammed, busted or what have you. Viruses are a minor concern and the same applies as always - don't download sketchy stuff and run an anti virus. Running Tor on a virtual machine mitigates some of these risks and completely removes the chance of being hit by a virus, but it won't protect you from getting busted if you do something illegal.

 

Your brother clearly doesn't know what he's talking about though. And Kali is not meant to be installed - be it on real hardware or a vm; if you want to install it you should just install ubuntu or debian and add kali's pentesting programs, they are available on most linux distributions.

[EPENEX]

Tor is just used to protect your identity by normalizing all users to look the same. So do not install any add-ons or enable javascript if you are using it. Your computer will not be hacked from just using Tor. Also, you are not 100% anonymous by just using Tor.