Anonymity is dead and other lessons from the Silk Road trial (STA BREAKING NEWS and ARCHIVES)

by Theresa , Sunday, February 08, 2015, 17:19

It's a story that belongs in a major motion picture. Hidden identities, narcotics, money laundering, computer hacking, blackmail and even attempted murder are all parts of this dramatic tale. But the story behind Silk Road, the online black market for drugs and other illegal goods, is not fiction. It was a very real phenomenon, and its creator, Ross Ulbricht, is a very real person (despite his "Dread Pirate Roberts" nom de plume). Tucked away as part of the Dark Web, Silk Road used the Tor network for anonymity and dealt in bitcoin so that transactions stayed anonymous. But as the recent Silk Road trial and Ulbricht's eventual guilty verdict showed, even when you try really hard to mask your activities on the internet, it doesn't necessarily work.

Little is known about how exactly the Feds pulled it off, but their story is that they were able to uncover the Silk Road servers via a software flaw on the site's login page that revealed an IP address. That IP address then led them to a location in Iceland where the Silk Road server was hosted. There are several members of the security community who don't necessarily buy the explanation -- some experts say the FBI probably hacked the login page repeatedly to force the IP address instead, which is quite illegal to do and could set a problematic legal precedent.

Regardless of how the Feds did it -- whether it be through legitimate or questionable means -- it seems that they were still able to find the server despite the masking provided by Tor. Also known as The Onion Router, Tor is a US Navy-designed privacy network that has long been under scrutiny by governments the world over for its promise of anonymity. While it's still notoriously difficult to break through, Silk Road and other cases show that Tor is not entirely bulletproof, especially from the occasional router exploit or FBI-seeded malware.

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