For its two and a half years online, thousands of drug dealers sold every kind of narcotic imaginable on the anonymous online marketplace known as the Silk Road. But put one of the site’s heroin dealers in a courtroom and ask him questions under oath, and the scale and consequences of that drug empire suddenly […]
The post A Heroin Dealer Tells the Silk Road Jury What It Was Like to Sell Drugs Online appeared first on WIRED.
The debate over online anonymity, and all the whistleblowers, trolls, anarchists, journalists and political dissidents it enables, is messy enough. It doesn’t need the US government making up bogus statistics about how much that anonymity facilitates child pornography. At the State of the Net conference in Washington on Tuesday, US assistant attorney general Leslie Caldwell discussed what […]
The post No, Department of Justice, 80 Percent of Tor Traffic Is Not Child Porn appeared first on WIRED.
On Thursday, the jury heard about the most human of all the human errors alleged Silk Road kingpin Ross Ulbricht may have made: confessing his creation to an in-real-life friend.
The post Ulbricht Confessed to Running Silk Road, His College Friend Testifies appeared first on WIRED.
Silk Road, for its more than two and a half years online, was an unprecedented online narcotics emporium. But according to a journal found on the laptop of its alleged creator Ross Ulbricht, Ulbricht wanted it to be even more: a “brand” that extended from communications tools to banking.
The post Secret Journal Allegedly Shows Ross Ulbricht Planned a Silk Road Bank appeared first on WIRED.
Ross Ulbricht was back in a Manhattan federal courtroom today facing drug trafficking and money laundering charges for allegedly running the Silk Road online drug marketplace. We’ll have a story on today’s court action posted shortly.
A few hours ago, computer security researcher Nicholas Weaver published some analysis about bitcoins he says came from Ross Ulbricht’s accounts. If the government has done a similar analysis—and there’s no reason to think they couldn’t—it will be one more obstacle for Ulbricht’s defense team.
Last week, the outlines of Ulbricht’s defense became clear. Ulbricht’s lawyer Joshua Dratel admitted that his client founded Silk Road, but said Ulbricht walked away from the site only to be “lured back.” During opening statements, the defense attorney acknowledged that Ulbricht, who had 144,000 bitcoins on his computer seized by the feds, made money from Bitcoin. Dratel said this was, at least in part, from being a successful trader in the digital crypto-currency.
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Just as quickly as the Silk Road’s defense created an alternate theory that the massive drug market was run by Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles, the prosecution and judge in the case have now shoved key elements of the story back into the closet.
The post Silk Road Judge ‘Eviscerates’ Defense’s Evidence That Mt. Gox CEO Was a Suspect appeared first on WIRED.
A new version of Silk Road has appeared on the darkweb, but it doesn’t rely on Tor or Bitcoin. Silk Road Reloaded uses the little-known I2P anonymity network and accepts a range of cryptocurrencies including the meme-inspired Dogecoin.
The site, which has no relation to the two previous versions of Silk Road, is one of a series of copycat marketplaces trying to tap into the lucrative online trade in drugs and other illegal items. Silk Road Reloaded has been in development for a year and can only be accessed using the I2P anonymity software.
I2P, which has been around since 2003, works in a similar way to the more widely used Tor network and hides what people are looking at online. Unlike conventional websites, all I2P sites ends in .i2p. A “clearnet” version of Silk Road Reloaded can also be accessed from normal browsers.
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The man accused of running the Silk Road, the Internet’s biggest drug market, is about to get his day in court. Prosecutors and defense lawyers are already poring over juror questionnaires, and a panel of New York citizens will be selected on Tuesday.
There still isn’t much that’s been made public about how the trial will proceed. Whatever happens, the trial, expected to last at least four weeks, is sure to reveal more about the dark corners of the so-called “Darknet” and the authorities’ efforts to master it.
Ross Ulbricht, the 30-year-old Texan who prosecutors say was the mastermind of the drug trafficking website, has remained steadfast in his innocence since his arrest more than a year ago. Barring a last-minute deal, his fate will soon be in the hands of a jury. If convicted, he faces decades in prison.
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UK-based Bitstamp, the second largest bitcoin exchange for US dollars, suspended operations on Monday, following evidence that online thieves had stolen up to 19,000 BTC—approximately $5.2 million—from its operational store of bitcoins.
The company alerted its users of the possible attack on Monday and warned against transferring any bitcoins to the service’s old bitcoin deposit addresses. Early the following morning, Bitstamp revealed that the attack affected fewer than 19,000 bitcoins. The actual attack appeared to have occurred on Sunday, January 4, when attackers compromised the company’s operational funds, also known as the “hot wallet.”
“Thank you all for your patience, we are working diligently to restore service,” Nejc Kodrič, the co-founder and CEO of Bitstamp, tweeted on Monday, adding, “To restate: the bulk of our bitcoin are in cold storage, and remain completely safe.”
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Advocates say tools that cloak online identities are needed to protect activists. Prosecutors say they hinder efforts to police all kinds of crime, from child pornography to illegal gun sales.
A surprising new study indicates that an overwhelming majority of Dark Web traffic is driven by the darkest activity: the sexual abuse of children.
The post Over 80 Percent of Dark-Web Visits Relate to Pedophilia, Study Finds appeared first on WIRED.
The FBI relied on Flash code from an abandoned Metasploit project called “Decloak” to identify suspects hiding behind the Tor anonymity network.
The post The FBI Used the Web’s Favorite Hacking Tool to Unmask Tor Users appeared first on WIRED.
How might the UK identify individual internet users?
The eBay-style contraband bazaar Evolution has grown more than 50 percent in drug offerings since September.
The post How the Dark Web’s New Favorite Drug Market Is Profiting From Silk Road 2’s Demise appeared first on WIRED.
With the rise and fall of the Silk Road—and then its rise again and fall again—the last couple of years have cast new light on the Dark Web. But when a news organization as reputable as 60 Minutes describes the Dark Web as “a vast, secret, cyber underworld” that accounts for “90% of the Internet,” it’s time for a refresher.
The post Hacker Lexicon: What Is the Dark Web? appeared first on WIRED.
On Monday, the US Marshals Service (USMS) announced that it will auction off 50,000 bitcoins belonging to Ross William Ulbricht. Ulbricht, allegedly under the moniker Dread Pirate Roberts, is suspected of running the first Silk Road, the hidden website that was often used to traffic drugs and other illegal sales. Ulbricht had 114,000 bitcoins stored on his various computers when the devices were seized by federal authorities during an arrest in San Francisco last October.
The USMS auction will take place on December 4. Today, a bitcoin is worth about $377.60, making the assets up for auction worth around $18.88 million.
The announcement comes several months after an initial auction of bitcoins taken from the Silk Road’s servers. In June, venture capitalist Tim Draper bought almost 30,000 bitcoins for $18 million. (Five months ago, bitcoins were worth about $200 more per unit than they are today.) The auction itself went off relatively smoothly, but not until after the USMS sent an e-mail CCing, rather than BCCing, all those interested in it.
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A large number of the Tor-anonymized domains recently seized in a crackdown on illegal darknet services were clones or imposter sites, according to an analysis published Monday.
That conclusion is based on an indexing of .onion sites available through the Tor privacy service that cloaks the location where online services are hosted. Australia-based blogger Nik Cubrilovic said a Web crawl he performed on the darknet revealed just 276 seized addresses, many fewer than the 414 domains police claimed they confiscated last week. Of the 276 domains Cubrilovic identified, 153 pointed to clones, phishing, or scam sites impersonating one of the hidden services targeted by law enforcement, he said.
If corroborated by others, the findings may be viewed as good news for privacy advocates who look to Tor to help preserve their anonymity. Last week’s reports that law enforcement agencies tracked down more than 400 hidden services touched off speculation that police identified and were exploiting a vulnerability in Tor itself that allowed them to surreptitiously decloak hidden services. The revelation that many of the seized sites were imposters may help to tamp down such suspicions. In a blog post published Monday, Cubrilovic wrote:
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The attorney representing Blake Benthall, whom prosecutors claim was the head of the Silk Road 2.0 website, told Ars on Monday that his client’s Twitter account has been hacked.
“He remains in custody and thus, of course, is not tweeting,” Jean-Jacques Cabou said by e-mail. “Blake’s Twitter account was compromised by unauthorized users, who posted the tweet regarding bitcoin donations. Neither Blake nor any member of Blake’s family authorized the tweet or its request. Beginning days ago, we took proper measures to report to Twitter that the account was compromised and the tweet was unauthorized. We have no idea who holds the private key(s) associated with the bitcoin address posted in the tweet.”
Last Tuesday, Benthall’s account simply stated:
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Silk Roads come and Silk Roads go. But after every law enforcement crackdown shakes the Dark Web, one Russian black market always seems to survive. For more than two and half years, the Russian Anonymous Marketplace or RAMP has maintained a thriving business in the Dark Web drug trade, offering one of the Internet’s widest arrays of narcotics of every variety to its Russian-speaking clientele.
The post How a Russian Dark Web Drug Market Outlived the Silk Road (And Silk Road 2) appeared first on WIRED.
The impact of raids on so-called “dark net” websites has been “overblown”, according to the group responsible for the Tor browser.
