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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

#81

Post by romanovcode »

ch8230 wrote: post #24
loeg wrote: post #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…

Seems fair to lump in with the rest since it was in fact an illegal market place.

Coloring everything in black and white is not very good way to categorize anything, especially bad things.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#82

Post by mfoy_ »

zo1 wrote: post #74
mfoy_ wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... if they released the addresses publicly, sure. But they just passed them along to Interpol...

And interpol would do what with them? Probably pass them along to the police-services of the respective countries that these people live in. Some countries execute people for drug possession alone.

Well at no point does that chain of events trigger a public witch hunt.

Interpol now faces an ethical / moral / legal dilemma of how to proceed, but passing the addresses _up_ to Interpol was not a mistake.

Now, if Interpol was to share the addresses with a country which they knew had cruel and unusual punishments for the alleged crimes then _that_ would be a mistake.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#83

Post by theEXTORTCIST »

snissn wrote: post #55
theEXTORTCIST wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Law enforcement could have easily MITM'd the PGP. They replace the public key of a vendor with their own public key (on the vendors's page, without the vendor's/buyer's knowledge), then the buyer address gets encrypted with that public key. Then they decrypt and resend the message using the sellers original public key. I really wonder if this happened at all

Then users looking at their accounts from other logins would see the wrong public key and know something was wrong. Also wonder if that happened at all

The only reason I mention that this is at all probable is because of the length of a PGP key. How often is the average user of a site like this logging in to verify even the last few bytes of a PGP pub key compared to what is saved in their software? Plus how many users would chalk it up to "oh SellerX just changed their key pair" and continue on encrypting their message with the new key

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#84

Post by romanovcode »

mfoy_ wrote: post #45
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.

To be fair... If you commit a crime, you have to expect there's a risk of being caught and punished. So how is this "really bad", except from the POV of the users who may face repercussions?

The problem with this example is that if I knew your address I could order drugs to you.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#86

Post by peaches-grow »

theEXTORTCIST wrote: post #43
mschwar99 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Law enforcement could have easily MITM'd the PGP. They replace the public key of a vendor with their own public key (on the vendors's page, without the vendor's/buyer's knowledge), then the buyer address gets encrypted with that public key. Then they decrypt and resend the message using the sellers original public key. I really wonder if this happened at all

My first thought as well.

Furthermore, in order to lower the risk of anyone detecting this here's something the LEO could do:

1. They seize control of the servers.

2. They make note of who is an existing user and keep serving them the real PGP keys of other pre-existing users.

3. For anyone who registers after the point in time where LEO controls the servers, replace the PGP keys of sellers and also the keys of these new users with MITM key pairs.

Then when they run the site for a month as they did and they have the influx of users they got from AlphaBay, they will have plenty of evidence on all of the sellers that are active during that period of time due to there being so many new users all of whom you are MITMing, regardless of whether the sellers are new or old because the old sellers are also being MITMed in all exchanges they have with new users.

The sellers were the primary target of interest, so the LEO got what they wanted.

All of what I said is just something they could have done though. Not saying that it's what they actually did.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#87

Post by AgentSpoofer »

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.

Everything is 256 bit encrypted though. No way they broke that.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#88

Post by Vespasian »

milesvp wrote: post #38
aqme28 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As with all security it's a matter of layers, with each layer making it more difficult, but perhaps not impossible to bypass. A simple deadman's switch might be to host some key piece of the software on a remote server that is harder to access geopolitically and have it stop responding without a periodic login. Recurse a few layers in different geopolitical zones, and it could be a relatively effective deadman's swit…

Why would any admin do this? It would absolutely ruin their chances of getting a more lenient sentence by cooperating with the authorities.

The police have these people in physical custody. Why would they take a fall for their (also criminal) customers? There is nothing to gain but much to loose.

PS: If there is not enough evidence for prosecution, having a dead man's switch would be incredibly stupid. It announces to everyone "You got the right guys. Keep digging for evidence"

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#89

Post by wybiral »

rhizome wrote: post #72
wybiral wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. It sounds like the site was mostly dealing in drugs, which for small time dealers I feel is a waste of time to prosecute... But the problem is that larger organized criminals often get their funds to do worse things from the drug market.

Wait, it sounds like you're saying big drug dealers are just selling drugs to get money to, I don't know, go on murder sprees? I'm not saying violence is not a part of these kinds of crimes, but I don't think the purpose of their participation is just to enable other, more serious crimes. That is, I don't think it's very common for someone to say "I want to sell a lot of drugs because I can't afford to kill enough pe…

> it sounds like you're saying big drug dealers are just selling drugs to get money to, I don't know, go on murder sprees

No. I'm just saying that the people upstream manufacturing massive quantities of meth and heroin probably aren't the kinds of organizations that you want to be making that kind of money.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#90

Post by jandrese »

xwvvvvwx wrote: post #63
wybiral wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. It sounds like the site was mostly dealing in drugs, which for small time dealers I feel is a waste of time to prosecute... But the problem is that larger organized criminals often get their funds to do worse things from the drug market.

good argument for legalisation....

The counterargument is that if drugs are legalized then the crime syndicates will need to find a new line of work. It's possible they'll go "legit" like the mob did after prohibition and get into the Casino business, but it's also possible they'll switch to human trafficking or gun running or some other harmful trade.

This is an especially big danger if you're talking about a gang that currently deals mostly drugs but also smuggles forced prostitutes over borders on the side. Take away the drugs and they're likely to expand the side business.

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