The Silk Road

 

 

 

 

On May 1, 2013, Silk Road was taken down by a sustained DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack.

 

The website, which can only be accessed through an encrypted network and whose URL changes constantly, is found on part of the internet known as the "deep web" or "dark web", which is not indexed by standard search engines.

 

Over the last three days the site has been crippled by a series of denial of service (DoS) attacks which involve flooding sites with traffic created by botnets - essentially computers mimicking humans - causing it to crash.

 

An administrator of the site posted on its forums that the attacks were the work of an individual who had been trying to blackmail the organisation.

 

The website posted on Saturday that it had received an email from someone, who goes by the handle "Lance G", threatening to crash the site unless it fronted $5000.

 

Silk Road is now offering $5000 to anyone with any "information that leads to the arrest and conviction of whoever is behind this extortion attempt".

 

Silk Road is an online black market on the Deep Web. It is operated as a Tor hidden service, such that online users can browse it anonymously and securely despite any traffic monitoring. The website launched in February 2011. Silk Road is an underground website sometimes called the "Amazon.com of illegal drugs" or the "eBay for drugs". Buyers can register on Silk Road for free, but sellers must purchase new accounts through auctions, a policy that was purportedly implemented to mitigate the possibility of malicious individuals distributing tainted goods.

 

Silk Road users pay for goods using encrypted digital currency "Bitcoins" and access the site using the "Tor network", making it very difficult for law enforcement to combat the trade.

 

As of March 2013, the site had 10,000 products for sale by vendors. 70% were drugs that are considered contraband in most jurisdictions. 340 varieties of drugs are sold, including heroin, LSD, and cannabis.

 

 

 

The site's terms of service say that they prohibit the sale of "anything who's purpose is to harm or defraud." These include child pornography, stolen credit cards, assassinations and weapons of mass destruction.

There are also legal goods and services for sale, such as art, apparel, books, cigarettes, jewelry, pornography, and writing services. A sister site called 'The Armory' did sell weapons (primarily guns) during 2012, but it was shut due to a lack of demand.

TOR Network

 

Tor (originally short for The Onion Router) is free software for enabling online anonymity. Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide volunteer network consisting of thousands of relays to conceal a user's location or usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.

 

This network is similar to WWW (World Wide Web) operating in the Internet, but discreetly.

 

Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace Internet activity, including "visits to Web sites, online posts, instant messages and other communication forms", back to the user and is intended to protect users' personal privacy, freedom, and ability to conduct confidential business by keeping their internet activities from being monitored.

"Onion Routing" refers to the layers of the encryption used. The original data, including its destination, are encrypted and re-encrypted multiple times, and sent through a virtual circuit comprising successive, randomly selected Tor relays. Each relay decrypts a "layer" of encryption to reveal only the next relay in the circuit in order to pass the remaining encrypted data on to it. The final relay decrypts the last layer of encryption and sends the original data, without revealing or even knowing its sender, to the destination. This method reduces the chance of the original data being understood in transit and, more notably, conceals the routing of it.

 

According to CNet, Tor's anonymity function is "endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistleblowers and human rights workers to communicate with journalists". It has also been described by The Economist, in relation to Bitcoin and the Silk Road, as being "a dark corner of the web."

 

 

 

Anonymizing systems such as Tor are at times used for matters that are, or may be, illegal in some countries, e.g. Tor may be used to gain access to censored information, to organize political activities, or to circumvent laws against criticism of heads of state. Tor can also be used for anonymous defamation, unauthorized leaks of sensitive information, and copyright infringement, the distribution of illegal sexual content, the selling of controlled substances, money laundering, credit card fraud and identity theft; the black market which utilizes the Tor infrastructure operates, at least in part, in conjunction with Bitcoin, and Tor itself has been used by criminal enterprises, hacktivism groups (such as Anonymous), and law enforcement agencies at cross purposes, sometimes simultaneously.

 

The Hidden Wiki

 

Hidden Wiki is a website that uses hidden services available through the Tor network. The site has a collection of links to other .onion sites, and encyclopedia articles in a wiki format.

 

The

 

 

 

As a hidden service, The Hidden Wiki operates through the .onion pseudo top-level domain and can be accessed only via the Tor network. The site provides a range of links in a wiki format to other hidden services and sites on the clearnet (sites that can be accessed in a standard browser). These include links to child pornography sites and sites selling drugs and other contraband such as the Silk Road.

 

 

 

The Web & Deep Web