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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

#121

Post by upofadown »

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

They can't MITM secure email from buyers to vendors (the direction with actual physical addresses) unless they subvert either the buyers or vendors email server. The actual email does not go through the site.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#122

Post by ryanlol »

nthcolumn wrote: post #40
ryanlol wrote: post #26

Dream Market is still up since Nov 2013. (1 year older than even AlphaBay) Perhaps they're the ones that are actually based in Russia ;P 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 ch…

The Dutch, Russians and US had some deal going on last year where their law-enforcement and even spooks were co-operating, tracking stuff end to end from russia to netherlands. It all got messed up by some CIA with a usb stick apparently. Russians spotted it, didn't like. So hosted in russia is not going to save you, depending on who your friends are of course.

I guess you're referring to http://electrospaces.blogspot.de/2017/06/dutch-russian-cyber... https://www.volkskrant.nl/4497360/ https://www.volkskrant.nl/kijkverder/2017/hacker/

To me this paints a pretty realistic picture of how difficult it is for western LE to co-operate with Russia, it's not impossible but it certainly isn't easy. Both sides will be cherry-picking the things they share, with the Russian cops facing ever-increasing pressure from the intelligence side of things.

It's worth remembering that this story ended with Sergei Mikhailov in a Russian jail cell facing charges of treason.

No, I don't believe hosting in Russia will magically solve all of your problems. I however do believe that it'll make LE co-operation significantly more difficult, especially after the recent events.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#123

Post by pessimizer »

peaches-grow wrote: post #86
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

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…

The impression that I get is that after they busted Alphabay, they nabbed a number of sellers and possibly some large buyers, who were held incommunicado. When there was a big migration from Alphabay to Hansa of both customers and sellers, there was an opportunity to set up many of those sellers' entire presence from scratch there. So it wasn't just the site that was compromised, but many of the largest individual sellers themselves, physically.

Of course, I know nothing and have just heard of either of those sites this morning.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#124

Post by ven_bug_trap »

senorjazz wrote: post #109
jandrese wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bu…

Then use the billions saved targeting gun runners and human traffickers.

And the added billions from the taxation of the now-legal drug market.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#125

Post by ShabbosGoy »

raugustinus wrote: post #49
peteretep wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For which I expect some of them to be charged with tax fraude or racketeering here in Holland. A lot of financial crimes, especially regarding taxes, are punished heavier than other crimes.

I wonder how cannabis dealers based in Holland would be prosecuted. Doing a quick search shows that cannabis distribution/growing is still illegal under NL law. [1]

I thought this excerpt was interesting:

"The sale of small quantities of cannabis in coffeeshops is therefore technically an offence, but prosecution proceedings are only instituted if the operator or owner of the shop does not meet the criteria issued by the Prosecutor General:

no more than five grams per person may be sold in any one transaction and the coffeeshop is not allowed to keep more than 500 grams of cannabis in stock;

no hard drugs may be sold; drugs may not be advertised; the coffee shop must not cause any nuisance;

they are not allowed to sell alcoholic beverages; no drugs may be sold to minors (under the age of 18), nor may minors be admitted to the premises."

Could an implicated dealer use the legal defense that they were operating a coffee shop online? (Provided that they didn't sell > 5 grams of cannabis)

[1] http://www.emcdda.europa.eu//html.cfm//index5174EN.html?#

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#126

Post by dragonwriter »

bzbarsky wrote: post #119
wybiral wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...It's legal to think about murder as long as you don't behave that way. That doesn't mean murder is legal. Is there a reason for the distinction?

> ...It's legal to think about murder as long as you don't behave that way. Sort of. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1117 ("conspiracy to commit murder") only requires one person to take action and everyone in the group that did the thinking with them is guilty of a crime. This is in the US, but I would be quite surprised if various other countries did not have similar statutes. More generally, there are a…

> Sort of. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1117 ("conspiracy to commit murder") only requires one person to take action and everyone in the group that did the thinking with them is guilty of a crime.

Wrong. It requires all the people to have taken action to communicate their intention to collaborate on the plan, and only one of them to have taken additional action toward acheiving it.

People don't think in groups; thoughts have to manifest as action for people to conspire.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#127

Post by mabbo »

the-dude wrote: post #35
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…

Why would the admin care?

That's... That is a good point. Damn. I suppose the best bet for the admin would be to give the private key as part of a plea deal.

Well, it would work for people who build Tor sites for moral/ethical purposes

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#128

Post by jimmyk »

wybiral wrote: post #112
jimmyk wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're pretty obviously different. One is a characteristic of a person, and one is an action that can be taken by a person.

Sure, if we're being pedantic it's hard to enforce laws against "being" gay so they enforce laws against "acting" gay. And until those countries figure out mind control it's just going to be oppression of their actions. Now that we've cleared that up, I still think laws against "acting" gay are wrong (within the same framework that it's legal to "act" heterosexual).

Laws against inherent characteristics seem to me at least to be worse than laws which ban behavior. Conflating the two in order to make some particular law sound worse seems sort of dishonest to me.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#130

Post by rfrank »

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…

> 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 people otherwise,"

This depends very much on who you're talking about.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ana-davila/drug-cartels-where-...

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