Silk Road back-up server fail
[3 Points] R4ID:
[3 Points] gwern:
Thanks to La Moustache and other people on Twitter for the search warrant: JTAN search warrant request
Some relevant bits:
Since November of 2011, law enforcement agents participating in this investigation have made over 70 individual purchases of controlled substances from various vendors on the Silk Road Underground Website. The substances purchased have been various Schedule I and II drugs, including ecstasy, cocaine, heroin, LSD, and others. As of April 2013, at least 56 samples of these purchases have been laboratory-tested, and, of these, 54 have shown high purity levels of the drug the item was advertised to be on Silk Road.
And:
In analyzing the configuration of the Silk Road Web Server, the FBI has discovered that the server regularly purges data from these databases older than 60 days. Thus, the image of the Silk Road Web Server possessed by the FBI contains data reflecting only 60 days of user activity, counting back from the date the server was imaged...However, the FBI has also discovered computer code on the Silk Road Web Server that periodically backs up data from the server and exports that data to another server. Testing of this backup script has revealed the IP address of the server to which this backup data is exported – namely, the IP address of the TARGET SERVER. Based on analysis of the backup script, it does not appear that previously backed-up data is deleted when new back-ups are made. Therefore, I believe it is likely that the TARGET SERVER contains records of user activity on the Silk Road website spanning a much longer date range than the data kept on the Silk Road Web Server.
IP:
This warrant applies to the contents of the server assigned IP address
207.106.6.25
(the “TARGET SERVER”) maintained by JTAN.com, headquartered at 1302 Diamond Street, Sellersville, PA 18960 (the “Provider”).
[2 Points] sharpshooter789:
Why the hell would he backing up the SR database in the first place. I could understand keeping a backup of the code, but not the database. What a dumb ass.
[0 Points] MF17:
Good
this is about the old SR not SR 2.0 title is a little misleading...anyways kinda silly to have a backup on US soil no?