Grab some popcorn before you start reading.
EUROPOL INTERVIEW Highlights [1] - Rob Wainwright, head of Europol, highlighted how a tip from the private company Bitdefender helped start the investigation into Hansa.
Last year, a likely European law enforcement agency deployed a Firefox zero-day exploit on a dark web child abuse forum. When the interviewer asked if a similar technique had been used on Hansa, Wainwright implied that some form of technical tool was used in the investigation, but declined to elaborate further. They also said they're launching a new darknet unit.
DUTCH POLICE INTERVIEW Highlights [2] - Interview is with Petra Haandrikman, team leader of the Dutch police unit that infiltrated Hansa. K is the interviewer in the conversation.
Haandrikman (H): When we knew the FBI was working on AlphaBay, we thought 'What's better than if they come to us?' The FBI wanted [the AlphaBay takedown] to look like an exit scam.
K: Where was Hansa physically based?
H: We knew the Hansa servers were in Lithuania, so we sent an MLAT (mutual legal assistance treaty) request to Lithuania and they were very willing to help us in our investigations.
K: So you made a copy of the Hansa servers?
H: We gained physical access to the machines in Lithuania, and were able to set up some clustering between the [Hansa] database servers in Lithuania and servers we were running in our country. With that, we were able to get a real time copy of the Hansa database, and then copy over the Web site code itself. [which made it so there was no downtime]
K: It has been reported that just a few days ago the Hansa market administrators decided to ban the sale of Fentanyl. Were Dutch police involved in that at all?
H: It was a combination of things. One of the site's employees or moderators started a discussion about this drug. We obviously also had our own opinion about it. It was a pretty good dialogue between us and the Hansa moderators to ban this from the site, and [that decision received] a lot of support from the community. But we didn't instigate that discussion
K: Have the Dutch police arrested anyone in connection with this investigation so far?
H: Yes, we identified several people in the Netherlands using the site, and there have already been several arrests made [tied to] Fentanyl. [He also added that the investigation is still going and that is why he cannot comment further on the techniques used]
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Looks like they're arresting fent users first. Fuckin fent.