Silk Road Shutdown: U.S. Law Enforcement Authorities Act

[Pythagorean]

Looks like the US government isn't the only one. The Silk Road is part of the "Deep Web" of the internet.

U.S. law enforcement authorities have shut down "Silk Road," an anonymous Internet marketplace for illegal drugs like heroin and cocaine and criminal activities such as murder for hire, and arrested its alleged owner.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/02/us-crime-silkroad-raid-idUSBRE9910TR20131002

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

That site was doing some big time business. It would be entertaining and scary to read the listings.

The FBI estimates Silk Road’s sales revenue at 9.5 million Bitcoins, with commissions from sales totaling 600,000 Bitcoins—the equivalent (depending on Bitcoin’s fluctuating value) of $1.2 billion in sales and roughly $80 million in commissions.

http://slashdot.org/topic/cloud/fbi-shuts-down-silk-road-online-black-market/

 

[danago]

An interesting, and somewhat scary, read about how it was taken down in the first place.

“Moderators and admins were our main objects,” one law enforcement official says. “We identified some of them. That led to some information to help us understand the inner circle of Silk Road. We also took down drug traffickers and those selling IDs and guns. From there we gained a lot of intelligence about the people involved.”

The real target in their sights, though, was the mysterious Dread Pirate Roberts, the brazen owner and operator of the site who they now say was 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht.

Fearing his admin would spill details about their operation, and claiming that the admin also stole money, authorities say Dread Pirate Roberts asked the undercover agent posing as a drug dealer to murder “chronicpain”

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/11/silk-road/

But then apparently it is back online, just 6 weeks after its initial shutdown, in the form of Silk Road 2.0.

The darkest corner of the internet: Murky online market selling everything from hard drugs to fake passports is back up and running just WEEKS after it was shut down in massive FBI bust

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...selling-hard-drugs-fake-passports-online.html

 

[Dotini]

Sorry, but the dailymail is not credible, and I do not think it is allowed to link to it on this forum.

 

[MarneMath]

For anyone actively involved in TOR or these hidden services, there quite a few theories that the servers (aka the end points) are now accessed and monitored by the NSA. Especially since the last essential DNS attack on these servers contained a plethora of NSA related address, along with the fact the the last malware that infected freedom's server was simply placed to monitor user information from an NSA address.


In response to Dotini, what isn't credible about the story? Silkroad 2.0 is up and readily available to anyone with the TOR address.

 

[danago]

Sorry, but the dailymail is not credible, and I do not think it is allowed to link to it on this forum.

Dailymail isn't the only site reporting this; I just chose to link it because it has some interesting screenshots of the website. Is The Guardian better?

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/07/silk-road-20-resurrects-online-drugs-marketplace

 

[danago]

For anyone actively involved in TOR or these hidden services, there quite a few theories that the servers (aka the end points) are now accessed and monitored by the NSA. Especially since the last essential DNS attack on these servers contained a plethora of NSA related address, along with the fact the the last malware that infected freedom's server was simply placed to monitor user information from an NSA address.

It's not a topic I really understand well from a technological point, but if the operators were aware of NSA spying, surely they could block access somehow? I'd imagine that the people running Silk Road are pretty well versed in how the internet works. Again, I only have a very superficial understanding of data encryption and information transfer between servers.

 

[MarneMath]

I don't think they were aware at the time. I believe people became suspicious of it afterthe freedom server suffered a DNS attack and later that day a ring of childporn folks were arrested and nearly all sites on the hiddenwiki went black. The reason why this relates is because many TOR sites are hosted on that server including 'legitimate' ones. It wasn't until hackers on the TOR site looked into who committed the DNS on the server did they suspect anything, and that wasn't until after silkroad went down the first time.