Rise and fall of a silkroad kingpin (good read),..

http://www.dailydot.com/crime/silk-road-confession-steven-sadler-nod/

The rise and fall of "NOD" one of the top 1% sellers on the first silkroad. he mainly got his name from the herion he sold along with cocaine and meth.

very interesting story to stop and read, i thought i,d share it with you all here and add it to one of my many useless info posts.

ah well....post your thoughts on this guy.:toilet:

 

Silk Road 2.0 is online now. They've distributed encrypted copies of the site source code so the site can be rebuilt quickly if it gets taken down again.

 

yeah....but it,s name ( SILKROAD) is the big target for LE along with it,s growth, listings on 2.0 are over 10,000 already.

not to mention the 3 (admin,s/ moderators) they arrested helping run 2.0
sad to say but i don,t expect it to last to long this time. or it,ll go for many years?

there,s lots of other options now. agora, pandora, drugslist, tormarket, blueskymarketplace, vault43(soon). that aren,t as appealing to LE mabye.

(on a side thought)...
could,nt Ross U. get his bitcoin case throwed out of evedience because it was tampered with, all the donations people have been putting in it?

if money was seized put in the eve. room and there was 2,000 less someone screwed with it and that evedence should be useless and throwed out right?

 

How can they catch someone with bitcoins? I suppose when they go to cash out? What if the bitcoins were split up and sent to many wallets, combined back, exchanged for other coins? Would it still be able to be traced? or would the crime have to be pretty serious, or would it not be possible to trace at all?

 

yes...i imagine,... cashing out requires some form of ID always.

all the sites have mixers for coins. the old silkroad would combine all deposits to 200btc blocks mix them and just take out what was needed off the top.

and yeah the crime would have to be big mabye not even possibale if you would cash in an out of bitcoin, to litecoin, to devcoin back to bitcoin? .DEA even said joe shome getting 1 gram of coke sent to his house is not our job to go after him were after the big players.

 

oh but ross,s bitcoins were all on the hard drive of his laptop i guess..
(how someone gets caught with bitcoins)

 

Noddin with the bitchin tar haha I remember..

please stop advertising sr. ok?

Nod is deadman tho lol. he has a lot of enemies now.

 

He didn't have his shit encrypted...sound like somebody got caught slippin'

 

Specifically bitcoin is by design traceable to it's mining, without which the value of the currency (that it wasn't a counterfeit) couldn't be reasonably established. There are just very good way to launder a digital currency.

Both he and the dread pirate roberts weren't caught because of any flaws in the encryption of tor, this guys girlfriend got caught mailing cocaine, and the dread pirate roberts asked a bunch of questions about setting up a tor service on an reddit account he set up with his real email.

 

You always get told that Silkroad, bitcoins and Tor browser and the like are completely anonymous.

But I always think "but this is the internet, and governments set everything up, so how the hell can it be anonymous if enough resources are put into it.

If this stuff was truly, 100% anonymous, the mind would boggle at what could be possible. But these possibles haven't happened. So to me, the Dark Internet isn't *that* different to the standard, government nosey-parker one.

 

Tor if properly configured can provide a great deal of anonymity. Setting traps is also as easy as surrounding this with script tags.
document.cookie="username=the dread pirate roberts; "

Just because a site is in the tor network doesn't mean it's not vulnerable to xss and other such attacks. There are much stronger methods of anonymity than tor or VPN's can provide if one were so inclined.

 

Tor exit nodes can also be configured to act as honeypots so u have to trust the exit node is not eavesdropping on traffic passing thru

 

Just run wireshark on your exit node. It's easy enough, and a good way to see some interesting traffic. Just try to uses end to end encryption where possible(tls). Even if the none of the traffic has ssl/tls, the data will only tell the node where the anonymous user is surfing for a short lived session.

 

looks like the fall of SR2 too.
site hacked and all coins stolen, closed site

The same bug that has plagued several of the biggest players in the Bitcoin economy may have just bitten the Silk Road.
On Thursday, one of the recently-reincarnated drug-selling black market site’s administrators posted a long announcement to the Silk Road 2.0 forums admitting that the site had been hacked by one of its sellers, and its reserve of Bitcoins belonging to both the users and the site itself stolen. The admin, who goes by the name “Defcon,” blamed the same “transaction malleability” bug in the Bitcoin protocol that led to several of the cryptocurrency’s exchanges halting withdrawals in the previous week.
“I am sweating as I write this… I must utter words all too familiar to this scarred community: We have been hacked,” Defcon wrote. “Our initial investigations indicate that a vendor exploited a recently discovered vulnerability in the Bitcoin protocol known as “transaction malleability” to repeatedly withdraw coins from our system until it was completely empty.”
A message on the Silk Road homepage linking to Defcon’s “hacking” announcement.

Just how many bitcoins were stolen wasn’t said in the post, although it listed a series of Bitcoin addresses that the Silk Road administrators believe to have been involved in the heist. Those transactions seem to point to a single Bitcoin address that contains 58,800 coins, worth more than $36.1 million at current exchange rates. But tracing Bitcoin’s pseudonymous transactions is always tricky–other estimates range from 41,200 by a Silk Road user and 88,000 by the Bitcoin news site.
Update: Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, estimates the total theft of Silk Road’s bitcoins at a much lower number: just 4,400 or so coins, worth around $2.6 million.
Based on the Silk Road’s data about the attack, the site’s staff point to three possible attackers, two in Australia and one in France. “Stop at nothing to bring this person to your own definition of justice,” Defcon writes.
Silk Road’s users, predictably, didn’t take the announcement at face value, and many instead suspect that the site’s staff have used the “transaction malleability” bug as a scapegoat to cover their own incompetence–the site has been plagued with more pedestrian bugs since launching in November–or even that they’ve run off with the users’ bitcoins themselves. “Transaction malleability,” after all, has been a known issue with Bitcoin for two years, and is described by most Bitcoin security experts as more of a major nuisance than a real threat that would allow funds to be stolen.
“Something’s not correct: The bug…can’t be made responsable if bitcoins are missing now!” writes a user named pathfinder.
“Oh, this is rich. How many users called for the shutdown of SR2 to fix the problems? They were ignored,” writes a user named aqualung on the site’s forums. “Admins did this. Not some vendor.”
Defcon denied those accusations, but took full responsibility for allowing the theft. “I didn’t run with the gold,” he writes. “I have failed you as a leader, and am completely devastated by today’s discoveries…It is a crushing blow. I cannot find the words to express how deeply I want this movement to be safe from the very threats I just watched materialize during my watch.”
The hack is just latest in a series of mishaps, crackdowns and scams that have roiled the “dark web” drug market since the shutdown of the original Silk Road anonymous drug site in October by the FBI. Among the more than half dozen sites that have sprouted to pick up Silk Road’s lucrative stream of Bitcoin-based drug transactions, at least three have run off with the users’ funds and two have shut down after being hacked. Several drug site administrators have also been arrested, including three former Silk Road staffers and five men in the Netherlands and Germany who launched their Silk Road copycat, Utopia, earlier this month.
Amidst that chaos, the relaunched Silk Road has been perhaps the most stable and popular marketplace for drugs and other contraband, with over 13,000 product listings at last count. And its hacking and sudden bankruptcy shakes the anonymous ecommerce community more than any of those other dark web eruptions.
While some Silk Road users wrote on the site’s forums that they planned to take their business to other marketplaces like Pandora and Agora, others declared the Silk Road model altogether dead. All the sites currently keep users’ bitcoins in “escrow” before a transaction is complete to prevent fraud, a model that often allows the funds to be stolen, seized.
Defcon ended his message to the site’s users by announcing that the Silk Road will no longer use an escrow, and will instead ask users to send money directly between buyers and sellers, a model that will no doubt lead to many more scams on the site. But he said that the site will move to so-called “multi-signature” transactions, a largely experimental use of Bitcoin that would require multiple users to “sign off” on a transaction before it’s made. That means a third party could serve as a trusted escrow with no way to steal a user’s funds. He promised a “generous bounty” to anyone who could help Silk Road to implement the change.
“Silk Road will never again be a centralized escrow storage,” Defcon writes. “Hindsight is already suggesting dozens of ways this could have been prevented, but we must march onward.

 

Nebraska man has been charged in connection with alleges sales of drugs, gun and counterfeit currency on the Silk Road website. (Silk Road 1)

Criminal Complaint available here. http://antilop.cc/sr/files/sheldon_kennedy_criminal_complaint.pdf
Silk Road vendor page: http://antilop.cc/sr/vendors/190db0ed02.htm
Picassa Album mentioned in the complaint: https://plus.google.com/photos/117077983407069201348/albums
Facebook account is available but doesn't seems to contain the quotes mentioned in the complaint.
Worth noticing at the end of the complaint that he voluntarily provided shipping information (including name and address) for sales of drugs and firearms.(and pics)