Developers of software used to access Tor - an otherwise hard-to-reach part of the internet - have disclosed that an attack on the network may have unmasked users for five months.
The Tor Project said that it believed the assault was designed to de-anonymise the net addresses of people operating or visiting hidden sites.
However, it said it was not sure exactly how users had been "affected".
The project added that it believed it had halted the attack on 4 July.
Tor allows people to visit webpages without being tracked and to publish sites whose contents does not show up in search engines.
The Tor Project said it believed that the infiltration had been carried out by two university researchers, who claimed at the start of July to have exploited "fundamental flaws" in Tor's design that allowed them to unmask the so-called dark net's users.
The two security experts, Alexander Volynkin and Michael McCord, had been due to give a talk at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas next week. However, the presentation was cancelled at the insistence of lawyers working for their employer, Carnegie Mellon University.
The Tor Project offers web browser software that can access the hidden sites on the Tor network
"We spent several months trying to extract information from the researchers who were going to give the Black Hat talk, and eventually we did get some hints from them... which is how we started looking for the attacks in the wild," wrote Roger Dingledine, one of the network's co-creators, on the Tor Project's blog.
"They haven't answered our emails lately, so we don't know for sure, but it seems likely that the answer to [whether they were responsible] is yes.
"In fact, we hope they were the ones doing the attacks, since otherwise it means somebody else was."
A spokesman from Carnegie Mellon University declined to comment.
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