Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

Post by hkon » Thu, Jul 20, 2017, 4:22 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #15

dankent wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, it doesn't look good when you're arrested on suspicion of running Hansa and next morning Hansa has a big banner saying "the admin hasn't checked in, we think something is wrong".

Post by theEXTORTCIST » Thu, Jul 20, 2017, 4:24 PM UTC

mschwar99 wrote: post #22

5_minutes wrote: post #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.

From what I remember poking around at Hansa that's not true. Each vendor / user had a public key associated with their account. All text communication through the website was supposed to be with GPG encrypted text secured by private keys unavailable to website. So law enforcement has lots of encrypted text along with some clear text from users not informed enough to follow any kind of opsec.

Post by mfoy_ » Thu, Jul 20, 2017, 4:26 PM UTC

delegate wrote: post #23

> Some 10,000 foreign addresses of Hansa Market buyers were passed on to Europol. 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.

Post by _xgw » Thu, Jul 20, 2017, 4:28 PM UTC

ryanlol wrote: post #36

mabbo wrote: post #14

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…

They seem to have done exactly that: http://i.imgur.com/yowD1Vr.png

Post by raugustinus » Thu, Jul 20, 2017, 4:29 PM UTC

peteretep wrote: post #17

5_minutes wrote: post #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.

Catching users is of limited interest to most law enforcement, and I suspect especially for Dutch law enforcement.