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Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

politie.nl

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Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#3
>This was made possible by the arrest of the two administrators of Hansa Market in Germany, aged 30 and 31. Since their arrest, the two men, from Siegen, NorthRhine-Westphalia, have been kept in pre-trial detention, and are only allowed to have contact with their lawyers.

So admins of the other markets: always have a dead-mans switch.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#4
Services like these give Tor and related projects a bad name. Taking down illegal market places is part of the police's job and this is definitely a success story. The article is lacking in details a bit, but it seems they've taken it down using regular old police work as they mention an "undercover operation". This proves once more that the weakening of security for everybody is not needed to catch criminals.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#5
post #3

>This was made possible by the arrest of the two administrators of Hansa Market in Germany, aged 30 and 31. Since their arrest, the two men, from Siegen, NorthRhine-Westphalia, have been kept in pre-trial detention, and are only allowed to have contact with their lawyers. So admins of the other markets: always have a dead-mans switch.

I'm curious how you would construct a switch that couldnt be bypassed by the police once they have full access to the servers.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#6
I like how they try and color the site by associating it with sites that sell weapons and child porn.

> It is Hansa Market, currently the most popular dark market in the ‘anonymous’ part of the internet, the so-called darknet.

> ...

> The darknet markets enable large-scale trading in chiefly illegal goods, such as drugs, weapons, child pornography, and ransom software. ... No weapons or child pornography were sold on Hansa Market.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#8
post #5
post #3

>This was made possible by the arrest of the two administrators of Hansa Market in Germany, aged 30 and 31. Since their arrest, the two men, from Siegen, NorthRhine-Westphalia, have been kept in pre-trial detention, and are only allowed to have contact with their lawyers. So admins of the other markets: always have a dead-mans switch.

I'm curious how you would construct a switch that couldnt be bypassed by the police once they have full access to the servers.

Even if the primary service itself was compromised, it would be possible to have an automated dead man's switch running on an alternative service that would alert the world that you were being held incommunicado.

Of course, failing to disclose the switch to the authorities and thus allowing it to trigger could be considered a violation of a court order and lead to punishment.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#9
post #4

Services like these give Tor and related projects a bad name. Taking down illegal market places is part of the police's job and this is definitely a success story. The article is lacking in details a bit, but it seems they've taken it down using regular old police work as they mention an "undercover operation". This proves once more that the weakening of security for everybody is not needed to catch criminals.

You mean they used parallel construction to make it seem like they used "regular old police work"

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#10
The clever thing is that they took it over and for one month monitored it without the users knowing.

Everyone on obfuscating their persona with Tor and bitcoins, still had to enter their postal addresses on the website, to receive the goodies.

That database must be a wet dream for law enforcement.

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