Silkroad Online Servers Always Full

[Klaudia Aricas]

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The first games console to find its way into our home was a Sega Mega Drive, and within a few months we also ended up with a Super Nintendo. Both were second-hand, a little banged up, and bundled with a scattershot assortment of about a dozen games that included classics like Sonic, Street Fighter II, and Super Metroid as well as forgotten oddities like Bubsy and Street Racer.

Being a console generation behind meant that what games I had I was stuck with. I lived (still live) in a relatively small town. We had one dedicated games shop, Electronics Boutique, and other than a very small selection of second-hand SNES and Sega games (mostly sports titles which I had no interest in whatsoever), the shelves were stocked with current generation games.

We got our first family PC around about 2001. It was a Windows 98 machine, had a horizontal case, and was stained that yellowy beige colour which was once so ubiquitous with gadgetry. It was, naturally, second-hand and already wildly outdated. It was also complete and utter magic.

I had been on computers before in school. The first time I touched a keyboard I wrote a paragraph about Power Rangers in Microsoft Word. We used educational software and messed around in Paint. But I had never been on the internet.

This computer was way too crappy to play anything close to that which I was playing on my Nintendo 64, but it was only another couple of years before we got a new Windows XP PC, and that started to open my eyes a little bit.

Not all games are MMOs in the same way that all films became sound and colour, but the impact of the genre and the experiences it promised (if not always delivered) have shaped the entire industry over the past 20 years.

Boy was it something to experience first hand though. To grow up, and in the space of less than a decade, experience the move from 2D to 3D games, text messaging to online chat, couch co-op to massively multiplayer online virtual worlds, and all the other innovations along the way.

For starters, the defense asked the government for the name of the software that FBI agents used to record evidence of the CAPTCHA traffic that allegedly leaked from the Silk Road servers. The government essentially responded (PDF) that it could not comply with that request because the FBI maintained no records of its own access, meaning that the only record of their activity is in the logs of the seized Silk Road servers.

The FBI claims that it found the Silk Road server by examining plain text Internet traffic to and from the Silk Road CAPTCHA, and that it visited the address using a regular browser and received the CAPTCHA page. But Weaver says the traffic logs from the Silk Road server (PDF) that also were released by the government this week tell a different story.

But this is hardly a satisfying answer to how the FBI investigators located the Silk Road servers. After all, if the FBI investigators contacted the PHPMyAdmin page directly, how did they know to do that in the first place?

It is called onionslice. It is a script that can resolve tor and get you the ip of any tor server. This is script is not documented and not public. Only the Government and some hackers from groups such as HTP and acidbitchez.

That said Silk Road had turned into a scammer filled cesspool with with its llegit trade moving away from consumers to large volumes. The escrow system fell apart and new users were merciless ripped off all with the knowledge of the admins.

So does this means that this case will be thrown into the garbage due to technicality? If this will happen, dread pirate roberts will setup a silkroad v2.0 but with better and enhanced obscurity on tor which means more and more american people will buy and use drugs and will also mean DPR will have a happy ending.

Wow! First I really need to say that I am somewhat concerned by the quantity of postings on this topic that seem to be anti-government, anti-Law Enforcement, and full of Conspiracy Theories. I am also very surprised by the quantity of Pro-Silk Road postings.

Eaglewerks is concerned about too many conspiracy theories posted in the comments and so provides a different conspiracy theory becasue, you know, his conspiracy theory is surely not conspiracy theory.

It is common knowledge the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court may be accessed by the NSA and or in some instances the FBI. The Silk Road servers and those in control of the site were a concern of United States National Security.

They took this tip and tracked down the IP and it was in a data center that was actually located in the Netherlands. They contacted the data center that was hosting the server and the Dutch government was able to put a sort of wire-tap on the server to watch all packets that were coming in and out of it. From there they found the server was talking a lot with the live Hansa server which was on Tor. This production server was in the same data center as the development one so from there the Dutch government was able to make hard drive copies of a few of those Hansa servers, both the development and production one. They did this without causing any outage on the site, working directly with the data center. The Dutch High Tech Crimes Unit combed through the contents of those hard drives. The goal was to find who the admins were to the site.

Further in the logs they found the home address of one of the admins. The Dutch government had the names and possible location of the two men that were running the Hansa dark market but a new problem was encountered. The home address of the admin was in Germany. When the Dutch government contacted Germany to request their arrest and extradition, the German government explained they are already tracking those two guys. The same two guys who were running the Hansa dark market had previously created an online site to buy and sell pirated e-books and audiobooks. The German police were trying to find the location of these two guys to arrest them. The Dutch and German authorities began hatching a new plan. They joined forces to capture these two guys under the existing German case but the Dutch government would take over Hansa.

In the chat logs on those old hard drives were a few Bitcoin addresses and the Dutch authorities were watching these addresses to see if anything was being sent in or out of those wallets. While Bitcoin is in fact anonymous, at some point you may want to exchange your Bitcoin for cash [00:20:00] and you need to do that at a Bitcoin exchange which is usually audited and licensed. The authorities saw one of the Bitcoin addresses sent money to an exchange in an attempt to move some money. This was a lucky break because the exchange they sent the money to was in Netherlands. The Dutch High Tech Crime Unit went down to the exchange to request the digital information on where the money was sent to. The Bitcoin exchange released the information and the Dutch authorities discovered the Bitcoin was sent to a server in Lithuania.

If the Dutch government was already controlling Hansa they could collect a lot of information of the users of the site and potentially arrest a lot of dealers in the process. The FBI agreed to this plan and decided to call it Operation Bayonet. Bayonet was a play on a few words; Bay comes from AlphaBay, net comes from darknet, or internet, and it would also signify piercing the dark marketplace. Authorities believe that with the takedown of AlphaBay and the government controlling Hansa, after all this was over it would destroy trust in the dark marketplace for a long time, potentially crippling the whole online trade of illegal items. Operation Bayonet was a go. The next steps were for the takeover of Hansa. The Dutch authorities worked with Lithuania and Germany to conduct the raid on the data center and arrest the two men simultaneously. Lithuania agreed to the plan and two Dutch authorities went to the data center to prepare for the takeover. On June 20th, 2017, the plan sprang into action.

The site had previously stripped out all metadata from every picture uploaded. These would be pictures of illegal items for sale but the authorities were able to strip the metadata off these photos and save it before it was posted. This would reveal the date, time, camera that was used to take the photo, and sometimes geo-location of where the photo was taken. Once this was in place the Dutch police staged a fake server glitch which accidentally removed all photos on the site, forcing sellers to re-upload their photos which provided authorities with numerous seller locations. By this time Hansa had over 70,000 listings on its site at any given time so this was a lot of information for the authorities to process. Amazingly enough, the police also tricked users on the site to download a homing beacon. They claimed this file was a backup encryption key to access their Bitcoins if the site were to ever go down.

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