Silk Road forums

Discussion => Security => Topic started by: onetimer1784 on March 24, 2012, 05:40 pm

Title: Silkroad and Fight Club
Post by: onetimer1784 on March 24, 2012, 05:40 pm
I come from a background in the warez scene. We use similar methods to keep ourselves hidden as people use here. However, rule one (and two) is always do not talk about it. This keeps its exclusive and with exclusivity it becomes hard(er) for LE to infiltrate our sites. It also helps us to fly under the radar as much as possible which is important (LE agencies go after p2p primarily as we are harder to find and there's less of us by several million).

My point is: Silkroad is expanding massively. This is great news in the short-term for everyone as there's more drugs to go around but every new person here makes Silkroad a bigger target. The tor system it is based on is by no means infallible (look at paedo siterings that regularly get busted). The more exclusive Silkroad is (in terms of people knowing about it and also usage) the longer it will last. You can see the problem when you look at the number of noob posts in the forums asking how to use basic cryptographic techniques AFTER they made it this far. This new year is seeing silkroad become mainstream. Mainstream news organisations have run programs on this new phenomenon - fuck if a researcher from 5live can get here its too easy.

It's quite hard (and counterproductive considering it is a business platform) to limit silkroad's expansion. I guess the admins could limit the userbase (this would by no means get rid of all the LE/noobs currently on the userbase but it would stunt growth) but that is unlikely to happen. Things like moving the address of the site every couple of weeks would also be a good measure and slightly less intrusive. However, the easiest defense to employ is this:

DO NOT TALK ABOUT SILK ROAD

Title: Re: Silkroad and Fight Club
Post by: kmfkewm on March 24, 2012, 07:43 pm
There is not a single record of a pedophile who used Tor for CP trading ever being identified. The most secure pedos who have been pwnt,, used VPN services or SSH tunnels. I did hear of one site being traced that was behind a multi hop reverse proxy though, and really that is more anonymous than a Tor hidden service (for the server, not the clients) (Tor does a really bad job at keeping servers hidden, but a better job at keeping the people who visit them hidden).

There was another CP server I read about that was just using someones open WiFI I guess the person running that site thought wireless signals cant be traced lol (actually a very very common mistake that a lot of people make in all kinds of contexts....the feds have a few years ago mastered the art of analyzing and tracing wireless signals prior to barging into random peoples homes and accusing them of all sorts of things )

Title: Re: Silkroad and Fight Club
Post by: TravellingWithoutMoving on March 28, 2012, 10:09 pm
- this is all speculation we don't know what goes on in the background.

- there are more registered sure but how is this affecting server load and sales?!


-  the rest just means the word is getting out and some buyers are perhaps testing the waters and more LE.

 ???
Title: Re: Silkroad and Fight Club
Post by: phubaiblues on March 28, 2012, 10:33 pm
I also suggest people stress the importance of security to newbs, and that those new on here explore/consider keeping TAILS https://tails.boum.org/about/index.en.html on a flash drive--or hell, just read up the Security Forum: there are many ways to protect yourself, and by extension, the site... and also, it's not a bad practice to use one pc for the forums, and then have a smaller netbook or such, preferably a cheapo, and take that to a coffeeshop, or use library with TAILS for anything serious--like ordering, or communicating on main site.

Mostly, tho, especially vendors, keep things quiet, hard as that is...late at night, in a bar, it's just so tempting to brag and let people know what you are doing, and this is some cool shit...but, like Fight Club...yah wanna keep FC going, keep it to yourself.

Great flick, tho, no way around that... :)