I would love to know how they got caught. There is probably something to learn about opsec from this. The paranoid side of me says Tor is unsafe (due to whatever - the authorities having backdoors on most hosting services, on your PC, due to the encryption being cracked by some unknown breakthrough or due to 90% of entry nodes being controlled by NSA). And NSA and FBI and co just have hundreds of people working on "p…
Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
251–260 of 381 posts
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every time a market has been taken down it's been due to OPSEC failure and other information leaks (e.g. Silk Road captcha IP leak, DPR's advertising of market being linked to his personal email address). AlphaBay Which got taken down first in this operation was due to a personal email being included in the header of the welcome email sent out to new users 3 years ago [1] [1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release…
But where did they get the 3 year old email. 1) They were investigating AlphaBay for nearly 3 years 2) They came upon somehow control of an email address which contained 3 year old mail that contained the password reset email 3) They are capturing and storing large amounts of tor traffic much like the NSA does on clearnet see: xkeyscore This isn't really explained in the indictment
When he was busted he was logged in to the site, and had several passwords/keys stored in plaintext on his machine.
Multiple OpSec failures.
Good analysis here: https://medium.com/@thegrugq/dark-net-trap-545ae5dd8476
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#253I would love to know how they got caught. There is probably something to learn about opsec from this. The paranoid side of me says Tor is unsafe (due to whatever - the authorities having backdoors on most hosting services, on your PC, due to the encryption being cracked by some unknown breakthrough or due to 90% of entry nodes being controlled by NSA). And NSA and FBI and co just have hundreds of people working on "p…
Dutch police claiming to have de-anonimized Tor: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DFNMsZOXoAIBdZ2.jpg
That uh, says the exact opposite of what you say it says
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
But where did they get the 3 year old email. 1) They were investigating AlphaBay for nearly 3 years 2) They came upon somehow control of an email address which contained 3 year old mail that contained the password reset email 3) They are capturing and storing large amounts of tor traffic much like the NSA does on clearnet see: xkeyscore This isn't really explained in the indictment
This is a really interesting question. Knowing how they got access to such an old email from an external source.
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a good point, but I can't help but think it would also help to have your servers (and possibly yourself) located in a geo that isn't so willing to bend to the whims the US, various European states, etc.
That would also be very helpful but hiding the ownership of a server behind a wall of LLC's and Trusts from various locations around the world is also a good idea.
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The cause-and-effect is backwards. They don't sell drugs so they can kill lots of people. They kill lots of people so they can sell drugs. Either way, there's a lot of violence happening directly because of drug cartels, foreign and domestic.
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#257>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.
Make the killswitch physical, an attempt to open a server physically destroys it.
This appears to work for carding rings that operate in the clear
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#258Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everything that is illegal is wrong. E.g. being gay is illegal in many places.
Even if it was -- not all illegal (or wrong) things are equally wrong. I'm much more okay with, eg, petty theft than murder, and would find it weird if people tried to make people stealing candybars from Walmart out to be equal to murderers.
it is pretty equal for the 3rd strike
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#260> More than 500 Dutch delivery addresses were reported to couriers and postal services with the intention of stopping the deliveries Does this mean that the goal of the LEO was to only stop the deliveries without actually arresting the recipients? If that's true then it seems the way law enforcement works in the EU is very different than that in the US.
unless they can link your computer to entering that address, isn't there some plausible deniability that someone else entered your address. Having drugs delivered to your house isn't illegal if someone else sent them there right? (Asking about in the US, but also interested in hearing if it's different or the same in EU)
I may sound paranoid but I've since stopped accepting unknown packages.