The owner of Silk Road has been arrested.

[syaoranvee]

Ulbricht was arrested Tuesday at the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco Public Library and charged with narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy and money laundering. He’s accused of running Silk Road, a so-called hidden website that supposedly allowed users to buy and sell drugs without fear of discovery.

Source

Silk Road was the infamous trade website usable on Tor, it generally traded in drugs and weaponry.  Ironically, it was probably the cleanest thing on Tor considering the other things available through it.

[gyeonghwa]

I was gonna say, the Silk Road that I'm familiar with hasn't been used in a long long while.

[SpaceProg]

Heh, I was thinking of the one Gyeonghwa was probably referring to.  The one that was around just a tad before the internet was.

[The Illusive Man]

Criminal mastermind my ass, that guy was an idiot.

I am glad to see Silk Road get pwnt. Addictive drugs are weapons of enslavement as addiction alters cognitive ability and prolonged exposure will degrade it. Don’t take my word for it ask a substance abuse counselor about the difficulty of counseling addicts. Fun fact, addicts cannot be cured they can only go into remission. The Tor network is getting fucked, first Freedom Hosting now Silk Road.


And now to the fear and loathing on the Silk Road forum:
How did they get the access keys to the Zion's mainframe?

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Supposedly by imaging the SR server disk. It does raise some issues though:

1) We assume the disk was encrypted which would suggest that the image was taken off the unencrypted disk (easy enough if it was a VPS,  more complicated if it was a physical server - it would require extracting the disk crypto key from memory) OR there was no disk encryption (or the disk key was stored in plain text in the boot partition) which would be border-line madness.
2) There ARE multiple SR servers, my assumption was that no one server held all of the information and at the very least the database was separated from the web server front end. Either each SR server has all components installed (the HS key, the web server, SR app and the database) or they have compromised multiple servers.

As other have pointed out, hidden service server location can be identified through traffic correlation - especially a site as busy as SR and indeed this forum .

A physical server with an out of band dedicated network KVM (for entering the disk crypto password at boot time) and good physical protection such as chassis intrusion would be the bare minimum for such a gig although bypassing those controls is certainly within the reach of a half competent attacker.

I would expect that it is difficult to hide the HS entry points for long but it would be possible to keep them moving around and keep them logically separate from the SR application and database.

Lessons for the future.

THESE FORUMS ARE ALMOST CERTAINLY COMPROMISED - USE WITH CAUTION 

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This server is almost certainly compromised by LEO.

All private messages, profile information and obviously posts are now in the possession of LEO.

If you continue to use this site please be mindful of the following:

1) You must disable javascript in your browser (disable it using Edit>Preferences>Content in TorBrowser)
2) Ideally use tor browser running in a Virtual Machine or use Tails or similar
3) DO NOT POST ANY SENSITIVE INFORMATION IN A PRIVATE MESSAGE (OR ANYWHERE ELSE ON THE SITE) THAT IS NOT PGP ENCRYPTED - that includes
 a) Phone numbers
 b) e-mail addresses attributable to you
4) The more time passes the less faith you should have in the integrity of the information on this site (such as PGP keys, email addresses etc) - this information COULD potentially be modified by the new owners...

it's been an honor and a privilege

stay safe

until we meet again

Obligator 9/11 truther

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DPR felt the heat, he gave few millions $ worth of BTC to kid named Ross Ulbricht to take a fall and jailtime and he disapeared....Ross Ulbricht may as well be SR employee but not the main guy
.I'm not buying official story like I'm not buying 9/11 pancake collapse.....and that about the ordering a hit is even funnier....common no PGP no nothing, even no privnote that can be used by mentally challenged...

he is out there, just my ฿0.02