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The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 2: The Fall

wired.com

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Re: The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 2: The Fall

#31

Post by avn2109 »

ufmace wrote: post #7
amyjess wrote: post #3

tl;dr: Ross was a colossal idiot who ignored warnings about the shoddy state of his opsec. I hate to say it, because Ross and I have a few mutual friends, but the guy was an idiot, and it's looking more and more like he deserved what he got for being so utterly stupid .

Calling him stupid seems to kinda miss the point to me. I think it's more that when you're up against the Feds, especially on something so deeply entrenched as being illegal worldwide as distributing drugs on a massive scale, you're going to get caught eventually, because it only takes one mistake. Sure, he was kinda dumb and made a lot more than one mistake, but how much better could anybody here do? Enough to keep…

I would have run my operation from Russia or China, and made sure to never traffic anything illegal in my host country.

Re: The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 2: The Fall

#34

Post by MichaelGG »

jaryd wrote: post #23
hurin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but how much better could anybody here do? Well, Kim Dotcom is still kicking it. As for Ross, the evidence might have been circumstantial at best if his un-encrypted notebook wasn't grabbed.

What always gets me is how (in this situation) he would ever operate a laptop that was usable without being plugged in... If he had simply removed the battery and kept the thing plugged then the laptop would have powered off immediately after it was grabbed.

Why would the LEOs unplug the device? They'd use one of those power transfer gadgets to cutover to battery and keep it running. Same as with desktops and servers. They can just grab him, not necessarily the device.

Re: The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 2: The Fall

#35

Post by MichaelGG »

fiatmoney wrote: post #22

"the local FBI wanted to mount a dramatic raid on Ross’ house. Tarbell ... was worried about repeating the mistake made during his first big cybercrime case ... a SWAT team charged into Hammond’s apartment throwing flash grenades, immediately alerting Hammond in the back room, who shut the lid of his laptop, encrypting it forever... Still, the assault strategy remained in place." So take note - the FBI is populated b…

In the first part, it talks about how the agent loves breaking down doors at 6am in his Doc Martens. I.e. loves being a literal jackbooted thug.

My only consultation is that hopefully one day prohibition will be fixed, and these agents will reflect and see their careers contributed nothing of value to the world. That they just caused trouble, like a bully. That countless lives, marriages, children got screwed up due to their pointless actions. I know, probably they'll remain delusional, but one can hope.

Re: The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 2: The Fall

#36

Post by forgotpasswd3x »

caseysoftware wrote: post #33

While the "topless girl" is part of the story, was anyone else surprised to see a drawing? When did Wired become NSFW?

I seriously cannot imagine a work environment where it's ok for you to be reading this article sans images, but it wouldn't be ok to be reading this article with the graphics.

> When did Wired become NSFW?

More like when did caseysoftware decide to work somewhere stupid.

I work at a generic corporate america job. I've got a generic corporate america boss, and you know what? He wouldn't get any more upset with me for reading an article with that image in it than he'd get upset with me for reading some article so completely unrelated to work on the clock.

Women have breasts. If you work somewhere where images of breasts are more of an issue than you know... not working at work, then maybe you should just not work there. It's not Wired that's at fault. It's your ridiculously backwards employer.

Re: The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 2: The Fall

#37

Post by SamReidHughes »

MichaelGG wrote: post #34
jaryd wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What always gets me is how (in this situation) he would ever operate a laptop that was usable without being plugged in... If he had simply removed the battery and kept the thing plugged then the laptop would have powered off immediately after it was grabbed.

Why would the LEOs unplug the device? They'd use one of those power transfer gadgets to cutover to battery and keep it running. Same as with desktops and servers. They can just grab him , not necessarily the device.

Well, if you want to be ready to quick-twitch turn off the device, pulling a power cord is usually a lot simpler than removing the battery.

Re: The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 2: The Fall

#38

Post by SamReidHughes »

mburns wrote: post #29
jaryd wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What always gets me is how (in this situation) he would ever operate a laptop that was usable without being plugged in... If he had simply removed the battery and kept the thing plugged then the laptop would have powered off immediately after it was grabbed.

That would have been an improvement, but even basic computer forensic gathering knowledge would get around this without trouble. What he needed to do is keep his sensitive files encrypted separately from his laptop login. Like on a USB drive encrypted with GPG and a nice long passphrase. Even then, the FBI grabbed him with his laptop logged into the management interface for Silk Road... So he still would have been in…

Maybe. For stuff like the personal notes you're keeping on a criminal conspiracy, a flash drive might be fine. But I'd be very skeptical of storing, say, the PHP source code to the Silk Road on a flash drive or SSD, because the internal data structures of the SSD could leak information about the sizes of individual files. If the feds can recover the sizes of individual files, rounded up to the next multiple of 4K, and you've got the PHP source code for the Silk Road stored there, it's game over. The same goes for filesystem encryption, like the kind ZFS (I think) has.

(I'm not personally familiar with ZFS, but the ZFS docs, especially https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E29007/gkkih.html#... really creep me with regard to this. The last thing you'd want is blocks in your local encrypted copy of PHP source code to be compressed first. And so then you'd think you'd want encryption enabled on a pool, but from reading the docs it seems that feature merely makes the filesystems on that pool inherit that encryption option, instead of doing some sort of filesystem-blind block-level encryption, where there's any variance in the encryption of blocks, or any information that could be derived from locations of blocks. So I think the suggestion to encrypt on a directory-by-directory basis to limit your exposure is not a very good one. I'd recommend that you use a spinning hard drive, whole disk encryption of the sort we have today, take out the battery, and keep your foot by the power outlet.)

Re: The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 2: The Fall

#39

Post by fweespeech »

sliverstorm wrote: post #24
fweespeech wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main thing is I would have sold it wholesale for Bitcoin as soon as it was stable and profitable enough that I could make $10 million USD. He hit that point pretty early on. The again, I wouldn't start an illegal business intentionally...so there is that.

If gamblers are any indication, what happens when you hit $10M is you start to think about what $100M would be like...

Yeah, I don't have that urge. My spending hasn't increased [with the exception of what I spend to help my SO out when she is unemployed] since I started making $40k, let alone what I make now.

Re: The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 2: The Fall

#40

Post by caseysoftware »

forgotpasswd3x wrote: post #36
caseysoftware wrote: post #33

While the "topless girl" is part of the story, was anyone else surprised to see a drawing? When did Wired become NSFW?

I seriously cannot imagine a work environment where it's ok for you to be reading this article sans images, but it wouldn't be ok to be reading this article with the graphics. > When did Wired become NSFW? More like when did caseysoftware decide to work somewhere stupid. I work at a generic corporate america job. I've got a generic corporate america boss, and you know what? He wouldn't get any more upset with me for…

I usually don't respond to trolls but this time I will.

I'm less concerned about my employer - after all we have the post-slaughter Charlie Hebdo cover framed on the wall - and thinking more of female coworkers. In case you haven't noticed, there is a huge "women are oppressed!" theme being pushed.

True or not, something like this is likely to set them off and result in negative consequences for you.

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