darkweb markets shutdown "Operation Bayonet"

sup lainons. figured i'd start a thread about what's been going on with the darkweb markets the past ~2 months. In short, two of the biggest markets used for buying and selling illicit substances, credit cards, general fraud services, etc. have been taken offline through coordinated multi-national government agency efforts. The creator of the biggest one, AB, the "Amazon of darknet markets," has "committed suicide" in a Thai prison (Thailand being one of the most ridiculously Draconian countries on punishing drugdealers, I personally doubt this story). HM on the other hand was seized on June 20th, but 1 month later they pulled the plug.. after apparently "modifying the source code to capture passwords, PGP-encrypted messages, IP address, bitcoin addresses [...]" So one of the biggest fears for users of these markets has come true, and many are reeling. A huge number of famous vendors have "gone on vacation" or simply disappeared forever. This operation is the biggest one since the first Silk Road takedown. Article by the guardian: Thursday 20 July 2017 AlphaBay and Hansa – two of the largest “dark web” marketplaces for illegal and illicit items such as drugs and guns ***(false, neither markets sold guns)*** – have been shut down, the US Justice Department said on Thursday. Police in the US and Europe, including the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Dutch National Police, partnered to shutter the sites accused of allowing thousands of vendors to sell illegal drugs, of which Europol said there were 250,000 listings on AlphaBay alone, with 200,000 members and 40,000 vendors. The sites operated on the Tor network, which helps users browse the internet anonymously. Visitors to the online marketplaces paid through digital currencies such as Bitcoin. ***(both markets were also using Monero and were in the process of implementing Ethereum, during the big rise a few months ago)*** AlphaBay mysteriously went offline earlier this month fuelling suspicions among users that law enforcement action had taken place. It was widely considered the biggest online black market for drugs, estimated to host daily transactions totalling hundreds of thousands of pounds after filling the gap left by the takedown of Silk Road in 2013 by the FBI. FBI acting director Andrew McCabe said AlphaBay was 10 times as large as the Silk Road. The site allowed users to sell and buy opioids, including fentanyl and heroin. US attorney general Jeff Sessions said at a briefing in Washington DC: “We know of several Americans who were killed by drugs on AlphaBay. One victim was just 18 years old when in February she overdosed on a powerful synthetic opioid which she had bought on AlphaBay.” ***(this is their own fault, knowingly buying one of the most dangerous drugs in the world comes with the assumption that you are able to handle it properly)*** AlphaBay’s servers were seized with the help of authorities in Thailand, Lithuania, Canada, Britain and France. The operation included the arrest of suspected AlphaBay founder Alexandre Cazes on 5 July, a Canadian citizen detained on behalf of the US in Thailand. Cazes, 25, apparently took his life a week later while in Thai custody, the justice department said. He faced charges relating to narcotics distribution, identity theft, money laundering and related crimes. ***(more than likely he would have received a life sentence like DPR)*** “This is likely one of the most important criminal investigations of the year taking down the largest dark net marketplace in history,” said Sessions. “The dark net is not a place to hide. We will find you.” The Dutch National Police took control of Hansa on 20 June, seizing servers in Lithuania, the Netherlands and Germany. The action permitted surveillance of criminal activities on the marketplace before it was shut down in July. Law enforcement officials in Europe and America coordinated their investigations to purposefully leave the Dutch dark web market Hansa up, even after they shut AlphaBay down, Rob Wainwright, the executive director of Europol, said. He said that European authorities took “covert control” of Hansa a month ago with permission of Dutch judicial authorities before AlphaBay was shut down. The goal of this “team play” was to watch as AlphaBay migrated to Hansa, monitor their new transactions there and “sweep up all those new users.” ***(clever girl)*** Wainwright said the ploy worked: “They flocked to Hansa in their droves. We reported eight times increase in the number of new users on Hansa immediately following the takedown of AlphaBay.” “The usernames and passwords of thousands of buyers and sellers of illicit commodities have been identified and are subject to more follow-up investigation by Europol and our partner agencies,” he said. The Europol director said that the “coordinated takedown” was “really special,” and said the coordinated investigation was “one of the most sophisticated law enforcement operations against cybercrime that we’ve ever seen.” Sessions called the case a victory against criminals who use “perverted technology” to send “so many Americans to an early grave.” ***(bullsoykaf, darknet markets are by far the safest way to purchase illicit substances)*** “Our critics will say, as we shutter one site another site emerges,” McCabe said. “And they may be right. But that is the nature of criminal work. It never goes away. You have to constantly go at it.”

>>1911 >DPR >Despite studying Tor and Bitcoin for two years, Ulbricht could not figure out how to launch his own hidden service Figureheads will rise and fall, while the puppetmasters live on forever.

So will OpenBazaar see any more use?

Just use openbazaar ~o~ . I bought chocolate their one time. tbh it is a cool piece of software o/

I've known more people buy drugs off of facebook and instagram than the fuarrrking darkweb.

>>1913 Openbazaar 2.0 will have Tor integrated by default so that's when DNMs will move there

>>1911 Isn't there a faster version/alternative of TOR called HORNET??? Anyone got info on that? I read about it years ago and would like to know what came of it.

>>1960 basically vaporware, it doesn't even have a network.

>>1912 > I hadn't opened a linux terminal until I left freedomhosting a month after. > DPR > 1/15/2012

Why are so many dankweb market operators so incompetent? It can't be that hard to run a hidden service securely.

>>2048 The plausible answer is: people do make mistakes, and those mistakes are usually both simple and fatal, e.g. accidentally leaked sensitive information though metadata, accidentally accessed something without Tor/VPN. There is almost nothing you can do afterward to revert the loss. This the how the most high-skilled attackers exposed themselves, except...it doesn't match what we've seen for dark markets, those operators look like wannabe idiots who just read some counter-economics, cryptography 101 and don't even have a basic sense of operational security at all...

>>2048 Another theory: the operator doesn't anticipate for a powerful advisory in their threat model, and when the time has came, it is already too late. For example, one may start a hidden service to allow people sharing copyrighted materials, in the beginning one would just do a simple server setup, install a PHP webapp, there might be five posters a day maximum during the startup, and one doesn't even have an idea if the website can survive. Clearly at this point, one doesn't want to bother with virtual machines, isolation or other mitigations. Such as: enabling full disk encryption on the server (once implemented, server management, especially remote management became pretty difficult). Or,, getting the best security hardware modules, such as hardware RSA module and TRNG module. Or, writing a special version of the application which separate hidden/clearnet traffic, control logic and dataflow to 7 layers, implementing least-privilege policy for each layer, making it impossible it leak information at all. Or, running Tor in a customized virtual machine or dedicated machine and communicate though a RS-232 port with intrusion detection to poweroff itself when the endpoint failed a challenge-response verification (CACert used to do this to protect their private key). Or, researching the law and records around the world to find the best country and best service provider for your website (in the beginning even if one can, they don't have/unwilling to spend the money anyway). These operational security procedures are not impossible to implement, in fact, even with intermediate knowledge, given enough time and resources, it can be done. If you are an organization of interest, whatever system you are going to have, is already important to defend it at all costs in the first place. Lavabit just came back with all those things I guess. But if you are just in the stage of starting up, you are a nobody, and you probably don't want to implement any of them. Later the website gets bigger and bigger, suddenly became a well-known site and MPAA put the site on their list. At this point the system has been running a year or two, closing down the website and rewriting everything for best security isn't an option for many operators. Even if you have mitigated to a better system, the trails you left is generally enough. This theory can explain most things, but still cannot explain the epic fail of operational security 101...

>>2048 Paranoid cyborgs with perfect opsec don't decide one day to put up a drug selling .onion site - it's the other way round: drug selling normals one day decide to use Tor for their "business".

>>3109 you're not entirely right about that, realize that there are hundreds of markets out there while some admins are careless/stupid and don't have any opsec beyond using tor, some know what they're doing the ones that are run well are not the ones that make the new headlines, they stay small, invite-only and secure

I was actually apart of all the major take downs in the past couple years, including FBI's operation darknet. It is much harder than you think to take down darknet markets, but its for sure getting easier since the good ones are in jail. Some of the biggest things I could add that would of countered almost all of my operations. Don't use VPG on AWS, its faulty. Don't use the same persona tied to the darknet to build credibility, and for the love of god don't use bitcoin wallets associated with your personal life.

>>3165 Are you able to comment on your tactics/techs/procedures during those times? What worked, what didn't work? I've never understood exactly how the civilian cops do business. If your TTP's are classified then please disregard, I don't wanna know

>>1911 I met alot of these people on tor that have been busted on the darkmarket over the past year. Strange events yet funny at the stupiditiy of some people. ie: become market overlord -> does the one thing every crimnal should know; you shouldn't buys a soykaf load of items; launder your money properly.

>>3165 nice larp dud