Silk road shut down (allegedly)

Seachmall

Seaneh wrote: »

Also, there is no way in hell he only has $3.2million, he's made several times that over the last few years.

Absolutely, and there's no way he'd leave his savings accessible to the police.

I'd guess that was just his "cash on hand" bitcoin, undoubtedly he has plenty of bitcoin stuffed in the mattress.

returnNull

srsly78 wrote: »

Actually maybe the price will crash. The feds might dump all those coins onto mtgox so they can keep the government running?

now that would be funny:pac:

GreeBo

Seachmall wrote: »

All transactions on bitcoin are public.

You can see transactions for any address on http://blockchain.info/.

Although it wouldn't be feasible to go through transaction histories to find out who actually bought the bitcoin.

I was talking about using Tor rather than bitcoin specifically....

Seaneh

Seachmall wrote: »

Absolutely, and there's no way he'd leave his savings accessible to the police.

I'd guess that was just his "cash on hand" bitcoin, undoubtedly he has plenty of bitcoin stuffed in the mattress.

He'll do 10 years (tops), get out of jail and his btc will still be there and odds are it will be worth even more.

The techie stuff in this thread is WAY over my head. So, I am putting my Miss Marple hat on......

FriendlyChemist was trying to blackmail SR out of 500,000 saying they needed it to payback redandwhite. Redandwhite confirmed that they owned the debt. SE then hired redandwhite to kill FriendlyChemist for an agreed price of 150,000. Who the fook takes the 350,000 less option?

Also want to say, predictive text on my phone changes FriendlyChemist to TETRAFLUOROETHYLENE. TeeHee ;-)

Seaneh

GreeBo wrote: »

I was talking about using Tor rather than bitcoin specifically....

tor is anonymous, but you still have to use btc to make transactions, and, with enough work, btc can be traced to a wallet, and a wallet can be traced to a person.

GreeBo

Seaneh wrote: »

tor is anonymous, but you still have to use btc to make transactions, and, with enough work, btc can be traced to a wallet, and a wallet can be traced to a person.

Right but again Im *just* talking about TOR itself, "they" cannot tell what you are doing from just TOR, they can tell that you are doing it and who you are doing it with, but vitally not what.
If you bring in another system, btc then that invalidates the tor security if its not at least as secure as tor network.

srsly78

Strawberry Milkshake wrote: »

The techie stuff in this thread is WAY over my head. So, I am putting my Miss Marple hat on......

FriendlyChemist was trying to blackmail SR out of 500,000 saying they needed it to payback redandwhite. Redandwhite confirmed that they owned the debt. SE then hired redandwhite to kill FriendlyChemist for an agreed price of 150,000. Who the fook takes the 350,000 less option?

Also want to say, predictive text on my phone changes FriendlyChemist to TETRAFLUOROETHYLENE. TeeHee ;-)

friendlychemist and redandwhite are both blatantly nsa agents :P

Seachmall

GreeBo wrote: »

"they" cannot tell what you are doing from just TOR, they can tell that you are doing it and who you are doing it with, but vitally not what.

Not quite.

Assuming Tor is working as expected and your anonymity is being protected they can not tell who you are, what you are doing, nor who you are doing it with.

If they happen to be monitoring your exit node they can tell what you are doing, who you are doing it with, but not who you are.

If they happen to be monitoring your entrance and exit node they can theoretically tell who you are, what you are doing, and who you are doing it with.

Capt'n Midnight

returnNull wrote: »

there's no 'nice internet IP trail leading to your door'.

Read up on how TOR project works.

There was a massive spike in TOR activity last month.People reckon it was the cops running there own botnet so that they could track the IP packets by controlling a mental % of the TOR exit nodes.

Read up on how TOR project works.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/01/tor_correlation_follows_the_breadcrumbs_back_to_the_users/

“An adversary that provides no more bandwidth than some volunteers do today can deanonymize any given user within three months of regular Tor use with over 50 percent probability and within six months with over 80 percent probability. We observe that use of BitTorrent is particularly unsafe, and we show that long-lived ports bear a large security cost for their performance needs. We also observe that the Congestion-Aware Tor proposal exacerbates these vulnerabilities,” the paper states.

If the adversary controls an AS or has access to Internet exchange point (IXP) traffic, things are even worse. While the results of their tests depended on factors such as AS or IXP location, “some users experience over 95 percent chance of compromise within three months against a single AS or IXP.”

Of course the likes of the NSA almost certainly run a lot of tor exit nodes (10% ?) so they get a good gander of a lot of tor traffic, ie. everything that doesn't have yet another layer of good encryption. And even then they can still use signals analysis to match traffic volumes with your ISP's logs.

Also sorry to disappoint but the spike in tor traffic was botnet related.

Capt'n Midnight

Oh yeah as for bitcoins being totally anonymous, not if you make a mistake, and not if there are lots of NSA full nodes.

http://bitcoin.org/en/protect-your-privacy

All Bitcoin transactions are public, traceable, and permanently stored in the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin addresses are the only information used to define where bitcoins are allocated and where they are sent. These addresses are created privately by each user's wallets. However, once addresses are used, they become tainted by the history of all transactions they are involved with. Anyone can see the balance and all transactions of any address. Since users usually have to reveal their identity in order to receive services or goods, Bitcoin addresses cannot remain fully anonymous. For these reasons, Bitcoin addresses should only be used once and users must be careful not to disclose their addresses.

...

Because the Bitcoin network is a peer-to-peer network, it is possible to listen for transactions relays and log their IP addresses. Full node clients relay all user's transactions just like their own. This means that finding the source of any particular transaction can be difficult and any Bitcoin node can be mistaken as the source of a transaction when they are not. You might want to consider hiding your computer's IP address with a tool like Tor so that it cannot be logged.

FouxDaFaFa

Seaneh wrote: »

Actually, removing $3.2million worth of bitcoins from circulation will push the value up, not down.

Also, there is no way in hell he only has $3.2million, he's made several times that over the last few years.

You would think so but it's dropped about 15/20% today in the wake of this.

You're right about the 3.2mill only being the tip of the iceberg though.

FootShooter

Great victory FBI! There is no use for sites where drug-dealers can sell drugs in a non-violent way while greatly restricting minors from buying.

KyussBishop

returnNull wrote: »

we werent talking about them hacking the target,we were talking about the tracking of IP packets.

Having said that,the americans caught that Irish/American lad that was responsible for hosting child porn websites by using a malicious javascript hack to gain access to the freedom hosting servers.

Indeed, this is the interesting thing - if they had access to the website, in order to shut it down, then they had the access they need to plant such a virus on the website, to track everyone that visits it.

This means Tor is not safe, even when you know how to use it 'safely'. I do coding with games, including exploit testing, for work - one thing I've learned for sure, is that the safest assumption, is that almost every single piece of software you use is riddled with exploitable holes, that can allow you to be hacked/tracked.

Seen it first hand too many times, and (through being in charge of searching out many of these problems) see just how easy it is for a coder to screw up in the most subtle of ways, which allows this.


When you look at revelations about what the NSA has been doing, then you see that the above isn't even the start of it either (considering all the backdoors the NSA is responsible for) - with the spying the NSA has been doing (which includes many countries, including the UK - I wouldn't be surprised if Ireland does it too), you can literally track the chain of nodes a person is linked through, on Tor.

William Binney (another NSA whistleblower) has done some great talks on this - he used to be in charge of putting together the early NSA Internet spying capabilities, that turned into PRISM.

KyussBishop

returnNull wrote: »

you'd need a stupid amount of exit nodes to make sure you got enough packets to trace the IP of the person your tracking.Then you'd also have to break the encrption on those packets that TOR puts on them and again the information in those IP packets could of been encrpted before they were sent over the TOR network.

Now the NSA have deals done with IBM to create special chips for breaking encrption.Some american professor reckons they can decrypt the data packets used by TOR users in a few hours on an older version of TOR which has a different type of encrption to the latest version.A fairly high % of TOR users are running the older version.

I 'think' (can't recall 100% as is so long ago that I watched it), that you can track the packets using timing techniques and other methods, which don't involve breaking the encryption.

I'm not in any way an expert on Tor though, so I don't recall - it was a talk by William Binney.

returnNull

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Read up on how TOR project works.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/01/tor_correlation_follows_the_breadcrumbs_back_to_the_users/
Of course the likes of the NSA almost certainly run a lot of tor exit nodes (10% ?) so they get a good gander of a lot of tor traffic, ie. everything that doesn't have yet another layer of good encryption. And even then they can still use signals analysis to match traffic volumes with your ISP's logs.

that sounds as if its easy for the feds then.

Wonder why they only got the Irish/american child porn provider after exploiting a security bug in the TOR browser and hacking his hosting servers if its that easy.

As regards the silkroad owner,it looks like he got himself caught from posting on various forums like stackoverflow and not just the fbi sitting monitoring TOR traffic.Having said that,the FBI havent mentioned anything about compromising TOR but somehow they found out where the servers were and they managed to get an image of the server so that they could trawl through it at there leisure.

the thing is TOR cant be used on its own to provide anonymity(as mentioned on the TOR project home page)it has to be used with other encyption and methods.

Also sorry to disappoint but the spike in tor traffic was botnet related.

Not disappointed at all.Was only pointing out what other people were thinking at the time.The strange thing was that the TOR client usuage in sept jumped from 500k to 2.5 million.Botnet!Yep but the weird thing was the new clients werent adding data to the TOR network.The TOR network has only been used for botnets in the last year or two,before that the network only hosted the C&C servers for them.

returnNull

KyussBishop wrote: »

I 'think' (can't recall 100% as is so long ago that I watched it), that you can track the packets using timing techniques and other methods, which don't involve breaking the encryption.

Yeah a poster earlier in the thread had posted up links to 2 or 3 methods people can use to correlate the traffic to the user.

bodice ripper

johnr1 wrote: »

Now why would this be anything but good news? and why would those welcoming it be derided as "narcs" in some childish way?.

Dunno, perhaps it was a joke...?


Anyway, the **** do I need Silk Road for? I can get Nepal cream/isolator/candy kush above board and legal closer to my gaff than I can get a sandwich.

Can't get me, Narc

humanji

You know you're out of the loop when you click on a thread called "Silk Road Shut Down" and assume it's about a Chinese restaurant closing down.

returnNull

Here's an interesting article on how to make yourself as secure as possible from NSA snooping.

The author even points out that its overkill and he doesnt use the methods all the time.He did when he worked with the guardian on the snowdon issue though.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/how_to_remain_s.html

FouxDaFaFa

humanji wrote: »

You know you're out of the loop when you click on a thread called "Silk Road Shut Down" and assume it's about a Chinese restaurant closing down.

Their spring rolls were so good...

*sniff*

According to some sources the feds had access to Silk Roads servers for some time.
I would say there are a lot of nervous buyers and sellers out there..

FouxDaFaFa

ronoc wrote: »

I would say there are a lot of nervous buyers and sellers out there..

You can say that again.

Couple of guys on Reddit said they would buy large quantities for people IRL. They had bitcoin being processed which was then seized. They have no money or drugs to show for it now and some people who are not the most understanding waiting for their stuff.

It's spawned hundreds of desperate Jesse Pinkmans.

wandatowell

Could you actually buy heroin and cocain on the site?

wexie

wandatowell wrote: »

Could you actually buy heroin and cocain on the site?

Yes, and pretty much any other drug you could think of.

christ on a bike!

returnNull wrote: »

Here's an interesting article on how to make yourself as secure as possible from NSA snooping.

The author even points out that its overkill and he doesnt use the methods all the time.He did when he worked with the guardian on the snowdon issue though.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/how_to_remain_s.html

Why, so you can watch kiddie porn?

What have you got to hide?

wexie

christ on a bike! wrote: »

Why, so you can watch kiddie porn?

What have you got to hide?

Kiddie porn isn't the only thing people might want to hide from the NSA.

There's donkey porn, horse porn, dog porn, midget porn.

FouxDaFaFa

christ on a bike! wrote: »

Why, so you can watch kiddie porn?

What have you got to hide?

Or, so you can talk to journalists or human rights workers from a country with government-monitored internet.

Or so you can just go about your business without having it mined and recorded by a foreign government. It's the principle of the thing. No-one is going to be interested in records of me going on boards and reddit and buying books but does that mean that I don't have a right to privacy?

Standman

christ on a bike! wrote: »

Why, so you can watch kiddie porn?

What have you got to hide?

Be a dear and give us the password for your email so.

You won't? WHAT HAVE YOU GOT TO HIDE? KIDDIE PORN??!1!:O :O

christ on a bike!

Standman wrote: »

Be a dear and give us the password for your email so.

You won't? WHAT HAVE YOU GOT TO HIDE? KIDDIE PORN??!1!:O :O

no

Khannie

christ on a bike! wrote: »

What have you got to hide?

Got curtains?

FouxDaFaFa

Tor statement:

So far, nothing about this case makes us think that there are new ways to compromise Tor (the software or the network). The FBI says that their suspect made mistakes in operational security, and was found through actual detective work. Remember: Tor does not anonymize individuals when they use their legal name on a public forum, use a VPN with logs that are subject to a subpoena, or provide personal information to other services

jimmyRotator

Khannie wrote: »

It's not untraceable at all tbh. I bought bitcoin once, waited a while, then sold it. It would be trivial for a law enforcement agency to trace the bitcoin to me. To properly use bitcoin anonymously you would need to be technically savvy and purchase the coins with cash and / or mine them yourself.

Every transaction ever made with bitcoin is public. (edit: in that the transfer from wallet to wallet is publicly visible)

You can use LocalBitcoins.com to find people in your area selling bitcoins, meetup and pay cash for the bitcoins.

Fairly anonymous if you ask me.

Hobbes

Seachmall wrote: »

and it has anonymity benefits as well.

Actually it doesn't unless you go through a third party, like Silk Road.

I recall an article a few months back where a shop stopped using them because it was very easy to get a list of their customers from the bitcoins.

jimmyRotator

I read yesterday that the Silk Road generated $1.6 billion in the last 2 years, which means that the guy running it has made $80 million in commissions.

chuky_r_law

Seachmall wrote: »

The Black Market Reloaded is still up as far as I'm aware.


The Silk Road had a good community and reliable sellers could be easily identified.


Not sure what BMR is like, but I'm guessing it's about to get a lot more popular.

registrations are closed at the moment

Khannie

jimmyRotator wrote: »

You can use LocalBitcoins.com to find people in your area selling bitcoins, meetup and pay cash for the bitcoins.

Fairly anonymous if you ask me.

I did mention that.....

Khannie wrote: »

To properly use bitcoin anonymously you would need to be technically savvy and purchase the coins with cash and / or mine them yourself.

The key thing for me though is that all of the transactions are public. The common perception is that they're generally anonymous and they're not. If you want to trade them through any exchanges, you're easily traceable.

daRobot

jimmyRotator wrote: »

I read yesterday that the Silk Road generated $1.6 billion in the last 2 years, which means that the guy running it has made $80 million in commissions.

He made loads of money alright.

And he'll have the rest of his life in prison to contemplate how he would have spent it. That's it for him, game 100% over.

I can't fathom how thick he was, to try and outsource help on stack overflow. That seems to be a big part in revealing who he was. It takes just one mistake, and you're done.

Finally, if you're going to try and run the worlds largest drug marketplace, don't do it from the US. The next gen of these sites will be based around former Soviet areas, and the Feds will have a much harder time stopping them.

Seachmall

Hobbes wrote: »

Actually it doesn't unless you go through a third party, like Silk Road.

I recall an article a few months back where a shop stopped using them because it was very easy to get a list of their customers from the bitcoins.

It's anonymous to the extent that the seller doesn't have access to the name of the buyer without having access to the Exchange's records.

And if you purchase, or earn, bitcoin through a method that doesn't require identifiable information your name is never associated with your address.

You can also send bitcoin from an address linked to you to a newly generated address that isn't linked to you.

My name is URL

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/02/silk-roads-mastermind-allegedly-paid-80000-for-a-hitman-the-hitman-was-a-cop/

Silk Road’s mastermind allegedly paid $80,000 for a hitman. The hitman was a cop.

The government says that Ross William Ulbricht, the alleged founder of the Bitcoin drug market Silk Road, tried to pay to have two different people killed in the last year. The second attempted murder was described in a criminal complaint unsealed by the government earlier today. But the government says that was preceded by another murder attempt, whose details are described in an indictment just published by the Baltimore Sun.

According to the government, Ulbricht was duped: the man who arranged the first "murder" was really an undercover police officer. The government says Ulbricht wired $80,000 real dollars to pay for the murder, but he only got a fake murder in return.

daRobot

My name is URL wrote: »

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/02/silk-roads-mastermind-allegedly-paid-80000-for-a-hitman-the-hitman-was-a-cop/

That was my instinct on reading the text below. Check out the response from the "Hitman". It reads like a film script.

I'm sure they set that up, to guarantee a life sentence for him.

Edit: The text I posted refers to a different murder that he is accused of

My name is URL

The guy should have got out of the game while he was ahead. You'd think that after making $50,000,000 he'd have called it quits!

He's almost like a real-life Heisenberg... even has an advanced degree in chemical engineering

I doubt it was just greed that kept him going either. Apparently he's staunchly libertarian and idealistic.

Standman

daRobot wrote: »

That was my instinct on reading the text below. Check out the response from the "Hitman". It reads like a film script.

I'm sure they set that up, to guarantee a life sentence for him.

Edit: The text I posted refers to a different murder that he is accused of

Fascinating stuff!

Something about that whole "Hitman" thing just doesn't add up though.

As the story goes this guy "DPR" was being blackmailed by a user who had obtained the personal details of thousands of other users of the silk road. The blackmailer wanted $500,000 to pay off his drug debts. DPR then asked the blackmailer to put him in contact with the person he owed money to so he could work something out with him directly. DPR then offered the dealer/hitman $150,000 to kill the guy who owed him money, to which he agreed and apparently went on to carry out the hit.

Why would the dealer settle for half the money he was owed in the first place, while simultaneously taking the added risk of carrying out a hit?

Granted it could have been that he didn't expect to see any of the money from this guy who owed it to him, so settled for half rather than nothing while tying up the loose end of killing this guy, but it seems much more likely that the whole thing was a scam with both the "dealer" and the "Blackmailer" being the same guy.

Added to this that the FBI found no evidence of any person with the name that DPR gave to the hitman living in the area where this blackmailer allegedly lived, and also no reports of any murders in the area in and around the dates it was meant to have happened, and it seems more and more likely that it was in fact a scam.

Makes you wonder if the manager of the biggest illegal online market in the world, a person who must deal with hoards of scammers daily due to the nature of his business, really didn't know - or at least have serious suspicions - that he was being scammed.

KyussBishop

My name is URL wrote: »

I doubt it was just greed that kept him going either. Apparently he's staunchly libertarian and idealistic.

Heh, ya not just greed, but power as well - specifically, the power to anonymously hire hitmen to kill people.

Certainly need to be idealistic to justify that - funny that Libertarianism is the ideology of choice there.

daRobot

Standman wrote: »

  It seems much more likely that the whole thing was a scam with both the "dealer" and the "Blackmailer" being the same guy.

Added to this that the FBI found no evidence of any person with the name that DPR gave to the hitman living in the area where this blackmailer allegedly lived, and also no reports of any murders in the area in and around the dates it was meant to have happened, and it seems more and more likely that it was in fact a scam.

Excellent point. One could argue two things. Firstly that he knew this was a scam, and the "hit" was the lesser of the two payouts.

Or secondly, he just got overwhelmed by the fear of being revealed, and feeling backed into a corner, wasn't able to think rationally about it.

Standman

daRobot wrote: »

Excellent point. One could argue two things. Firstly that he knew this was a scam, and the "hit" was the lesser of the two payouts.

Or secondly, he just got overwhelmed by the fear of being revealed, and feeling backed into a corner, wasn't able to think rationally about it.

As far as I can tell, the blackmailer had personal information on many users but not DPR himself, so if I was a betting man my money would be on this "hit" being the lesser of the two payouts in his eyes, with all the talk of a previous hit being cheaper etc being a part of his bargaining/intimidation strategy in dealing with this scammer.

One thing that doesn't make sense is that apparently months later, DPR contacted this "hitman" again in order to source some fake ID's for himself, which wouldn't make much sense if DPR suspected him of being a scammer.

Lot's of things not adding up here!

FouxDaFaFa

Standman wrote: »

Lot's of things not adding up here!

Including the owner of Atlantis, a rival site, suddenly shutting down and vanishing a week ago.

(This is my version of a soap).

Augmerson

Seachmall wrote: »

Absolutely.

It's open source.

I don't need to trust the US government to trust Tor. I just need to trust that others don't trust the US government to trust Tor.

I'm just a regular people. This sentence both baffled and tantalised me. This whole thread is like a delightful mix of Sneakers and Hackers.

HACK THE PLANET!

nelly17

Cant help but think that the publicity generated by shutting this down so publicly (although how else could you do it?) will result in a hundred and one other copy cat sites run from far reached corners of the globe with no extradition agreements with the U.S

stoneill

How come I only ever hear of these sites after they are shutdown?