Wired : The FBI Finally Says How It 'Legally' Pinpointed Silk Road's Server

Here's the link : http://www.wired.com/2014/09/the-fbi-finally-says-how-it-legally-pinpointed-silk-roads-server/

Can anyone with more tech knowledge than me comment?


Comments


[6 Points] MBisme:

Congrats on stumbling across a 2 month old article :). Just giving you a hard time, I reread this myself recently. General consensus is that the leaky captcha story is bull. Truth may come out during the trial, but I doubt it.


[3 Points] Theeconomist1:

If this is true it's a pretty big blunder. To the OP, not sure how in depth you want I'm mobile now so I'll be quick. When you request a page there are underlying connections made back to the server to fetch things like images, scripts etc. Those are done by your browser under the hood so your one request is actually a series of requests back to fetch resources. The captcha which is basically an image fetched from a service looks like it wasn't routed properly. Instead of going through TOR network like your request did and how it should, it went back to an IP address which means they fetched the image directly from the server. A simple packet sniffer installed on the clients computer would easily reveal all these packets and connections. They saw one that didn't go to a tor node and instead went direct to SR server. Pretty bad blunder.


[2 Points] iLoveDNM:

Lies. They are describing "fuzzing" when they claim to have typed random things in the box. A properly set up tow service has no way of knowing it's public facing IP,it doesn't take a good programmer to accomplish this, tor documentation covers this very well. There have been a few thorough debunks of this explanation.


[1 Points] gwern:

Can anyone with more tech knowledge than me comment?

There was a lot of commentary and skepticism at the time, but you'll have to look it up since it was a while ago as these things go.


[1 Points] jojaguy:

Basically it seems like the FBI were using a packet sniffer such as "wireshark", although I assume our FBI has a better program for this lol, to watch out for unknown IP addresses. I feel like it has nothing to do with the captcha, but more with the database SR had for the usernames and passwords of it's users, which would definitely be stored on DPR's server. When they noticed this connection to the Icelandic server, they were tipped off. Basically, if what they say is true, DPR is utterly fucked.