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Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

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Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#141

Post by dsfyu404ed »

vkou wrote: post #79
z3phyr wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People under influence do indeed pose danger to other people. Even the influence of alcohol is potentially dangerous in certain situations leading to incidents ranging from hit and run to domestic violence.

People with _______ pose a danger to other people. It is incredibly hypocritical to come down on someone for consuming LSD in their own home, but not on someone getting pissed drunk in their own home. Tens of thousands of people are killed by people under the influence of alcohol in the United States. How many people are killed by people under the influence of LSD? (I have never used drugs, other then alcohol.)

Guns, cars, "homosexual tendencies", etc, etc all fit into that blank.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#142

Post by jstanley »

RutZap wrote: post #37

I think this is brilliant. A very efficient way of policing and removing a lot of drugs from the market without spending a lot of public money and wasting time on the streets. Also the darknet is great as it reduces the violence associated with drug crime, by taking the drugs off the streets and into the legitimate courier business. You have to love technology sometimes.

It seems like your statements are contradictory.

This bust was good because it reduced the amount of drugs being sold on dark net markets.

Dark net markets are good because they reduce the amount of drugs being sold on the street.

So which is it? Is it a good thing to take down the dark net markets or not?

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#143

Post by amyjess »

TillE wrote: post #28
deanclatworthy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is fanciful. It assumes both extreme competence and legal powers to compel just about anything, neither of which generally exist. 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 founder of the Silk Road was caught because he slipped up and gave away his identity. The founder of Alphabay was caught because he put his personal email address in the welcome emails.

The police relied on opsec faulires, not technical measures to capture them.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#144

Post by jimmyk »

treyfitty wrote: post #113
jimmyk wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>being gay is illegal in many places. Is that true? Or is it the behavior that's illegal?

I think what you're trying to ask is: Is being labeled gay grounds for imprisonment? Or does one have to be caught in the act of fornicating with a male to be imprisoned? I'm sure it depends on the jurisdiction, but many jurisdictions that have this kind of explicit law usually frowns upon homosexuality so much, that the mere accusation is enough to be damaging.

What I'm asking is more like, if the government microphone in your potted plant hears you coming out as gay to your friends, would that be grounds for criminal punishment?

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#145

Post by BearGoesChirp »

atemerev wrote: post #34
ch8230 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not everything that is illegal is wrong. E.g. being gay is illegal in many places.

Buying drugs can fund actions far worse than just creating drugs. From human slavery (drug mules) to murder. Some of the other things on that list are bad not because the actual item being traded is bad, but because of what the trade enables. I'm not seeing a significant difference between the markets in this regard, except for popularity.

Compared to the example you gave, where no one is harmed and no further harm is caused or funded by people being gay.

Edit to specify that this doesn't happen in every drug transaction.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#146

Post by mindcrime »

blattimwind wrote: post #105
mindcrime wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It leads one to wonder... what is the "best" place to host servers if you're going to run a darkweb market? Seems like you'd want a place where the government/police/spooks aren't as tech savvy and sophisticated, and perhaps somewhere where the government isn't on the best terms with traditional Western powers. Venezuela? But do they even have electricity for running servers? Maybe some smaller African nations? Botsw…

> Venezuela? But do they even have electricity for running servers? Venezuela isn't a third world country. Yes, they have electricity (and it is very cheap, hence a lot of BTC mining there).

OK, maybe I was being a little glib. But still, the news reports I hear from that area haven't been very positive as of late, and I do wonder if the country is fundamentally stable enough to rely on hosting anything there.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#147

Post by BearGoesChirp »

forgotpwtomain wrote: post #18
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.

> 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

They fund the ones supplying those drugs which involves a significant harm to society. Just look at people who are unwilling participants in the drug trade or those who receive funds from selling drugs to sell other things such as weapons or even humans.

(Yes, I realize legalizing local drug production and distribution would undercut the market, which is one reason why I am for legalization. But that does not excuse supporting the current cartels.)

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#148

Post by joosters »

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

While I doubt that many people check the vendor's public keys, it would just take one person to notice that a vendor has a different public key from another site (for example, AlphaBay, since there must have been lots of users moving to Hansa from there). If they questioned the vendor about it, they'd discover something was wrong. This would then blow the cover of the police, or at the very least be a big red flag showing that the site had been hacked.

In short, I doubt the police did this kind of thing because they risked blowing their cover for the sake of getting some buyers' addresses.

Also, these sites tend to have a big button labelled 'encrypt my message' - which ostensibly does all the PGP for you. I'd guess that most people are lazy and just press this instead of running PGP/GPG manually. It would be trivial for the police to capture the unencrypted messages just by subverting the auto-PGP.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#149

Post by mindcrime »

mullen wrote: post #118
mindcrime wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It leads one to wonder... what is the "best" place to host servers if you're going to run a darkweb market? Seems like you'd want a place where the government/police/spooks aren't as tech savvy and sophisticated, and perhaps somewhere where the government isn't on the best terms with traditional Western powers. Venezuela? But do they even have electricity for running servers? Maybe some smaller African nations? Botsw…

I have thinking about this and I don't think it really has to do with location of your servers, it is the coding and architecture of the server environment along with server operators OPSEC. All of the Dark Net drug website busts I have seen over the last few years are because of poor coding, poor architecture, poor security and even worse OPSEC. The people who run these sites are not professionals.

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.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#150

Post by kogepathic »

indigochill wrote: post #120
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

This has me curious (as a complete crypto noob): how would one defend against such a MITM attack in general? Only send messages to vendors with known "trusted" keys and don't trust new keys? So in general, use a trusted channel for key exchange separate from the communication channel so that a MITM needs to control both channels?

> So in general, use a trusted channel for key exchange separate from the communication channel so that a MITM needs to control both channels?

Yes, this is how PGP verification is supposed to take place.

Someone sends you their public key, and then you meet them in person to verify it.

Of course, nothing stops the government from sending an agent to meet you, but it does raise the effort required to MITM substantially.

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