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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.
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.
So law enforcement has lots of encrypted text along with some clear text from users not informed enough to follow any kind of opsec.
That's really bad, because not all countries are Holland, which is famous for its 'relaxed' attitude towards drugs in general, so some users might have their lives turned around by this - followed, arrested, jailed, extorted, etc.
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…
>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.
You seriously have to be a moron to host your DNM in Canada or NL though, NL LE especially has many years of experience and millions worth of equipment for these investigations. Pick a place where they're less likely to have advanced DMA equipment handy! Even better though, is to choose a place where the FBI won't be able to fly a team with advanced DMA equipment.
In fact, I wouldn't be too shocked if the rather sophisticated wiretap gear the Dutch police have at AMS-IX was capable of identifying hidden sites with timing attacks.
Supposedly this was posted on Hansa forums by the staff in the middle of the takedown http://i.imgur.com/yowD1Vr.png
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alert users that the market is compromised. An example, an admin could have a personal password that is used to update a secure hash of "last known time the market was not compromised". The users can use the public key to verify the markers. Every day or two, the admin updates that marker using the private key (password). A few days after they're arrested, they won't have updated it, the users will know something is…
This is an over engineered solution, and I never understood the value of these warrant canaries etc. In the right set of circumstances you would be compelled to hand over any keys (with their passphrase) in an investigation like this, and failure to do so would result in harsher penalties. People are the weak link here.
You can often be forced to unlock encrypted data as part of evidence gathering, but there's no legal power to make you conduct arbitrary processes which only exist in your head.
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.
> That database must be a wet dream for law enforcement. Because obviously people buying a few pills of ecstasy or a tab of LSD are a serious danger to society and should be taken of the streets. /s
Because obviously it's impossible to express that one party might have viewed an outcome as favorable without agreeing with that view. /s
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.
> Services like these give Tor and related projects a bad name In more ways than one. What if this had been a tor website that was sharing documents proving government or police corruption? And yet somehow, the police did manage to shut it down. It goes to show that the tech needed for fully anonymous websites may not be good enough yet. Any sufficiently anonymous website that could be used for good reasons can also…
The tech will never be good enough. Even if we had magic unexploitable webapps hosted in the platonic realm of pure forms whose privacy is protected by magic cryptography, darknet markets would still get busted. Darknet markets require support staff, managers and engineers to run the site. The humans who run such sites will always be exploitable.
