Tor is the king of Internet anonymity. If you don't want the NSA or other lawless spy agencies spying on you, get Tor at https://www.torproject.org/.

By using an array of "anonymizing" techniques, Tor has defeated all attempts by the NSA, other national spy agencies and cybercriminals to break into it to steal invaluable data.

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Now comes Russian President Vladimir Putin with a different but old fashioned technique of beating Tor: money

Russia's Ministry of the Interior is offering anyone US$110,000 or 3.9 million rubles "to study the possibility of obtaining technical information on users and users' equipment of Tor anonymous network."

That this is an official announcement from the Russian government led by Putin is verified by the bounty being posted last week on the Russian government's website for state purchases.

There are a lot of Tor users in Russia. The number of Tor users in Russia tripled over the last 12 months to more than 150,000, said the Tor Project.

Tor's popularity in the dictatorial state run by Putin is due to a combination of factors. Chief among these are the historical penchant for spying on its citizens by the Russian government and also by revelations about U.S. government surveillance by whistleblower Edward Snowden, who currently resides in Moscow.

Snowden famously used Tor to successfully prevent U.S. spy agencies from determining his exact location in Russia when he gave his first ever live Internet interview a few months ago.

Tech boffins are surprised at Putin's gall to think a mere US$110,000 will be enough to motivate a lone hacker, let alone a group of hackers, to try to compromise Tor.

Tor protects the personal privacy of users. It also protects their freedom and ability to conduct confidential communications by keeping their Internet activities from being monitored by anyone.

Tor, the free software engineered by the non-profit Tor Project, sends each user's traffic across various nodes around the world. It encrypts traffic at every layer and makes it very difficult to track, even by sophisticated spy agencies like the U.S. National Security Agency or NSA.

The NSA has shown grudging admiration for Tor. In a Top Secret appraisal, the NSA called Tor "the King of high secure, low latency Internet anonymity" with "no contenders for the throne in waiting."

Tor, previously an acronym for "The Onion Router," is popular among hackers, criminals and political dissidents around the world because it enables online anonymity and resists censorship.

Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer network consisting of more than 5,000 relays to conceal a user's location or usage from anyone or anything conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.

Tor encrypts original data, including the destination IP address, multiple times and sends it through a virtual circuit comprising successive, randomly selected Tor relays.

Using Tor makes it more difficult for Internet activity to be traced back to the user. This includes visits to Web sites, online posts and instant messages, among others.