Het doek valt voor online drugsleverancier Silk Road

17 april 2012

De blogpost over Silkroad, van juni 2011, wordt nog altijd goed bezocht. Toen het programma Spuiten en Slikken er aandacht aan besteedde was er zelfs sprake van een heuse piek. Maar de aandacht was slechts tijdelijk gunstig voor deze online drugsleverancier. Wired meldt dat het doek is gevallen en dat er 8 verdachten zijn aangehouden, waaronder een Nederlander.

De verdachten waanden zich veilig omdat zij gebruik maakten van Tor en Hushmail. Ten onrechte:

In 2007, one of the defendants sent an e-mail to Willems saying that Hushmail was a secure method of communicating because the Canada-based service would not hand over e-mail content to law enforcement agents. That’s an assertion that turned out not to be true, as Threat Level reported that same year.

The indictment does not give any indication how the feds pierced the veil of the technological tools used to shield the operation from being tracked, but the document is filled with evidence gathered from e-mail communications that took place between 2007 and 2009, while the defendants were using Hushmail.

The online drug operation moved to the Tor anonymizing network in 2010.

Tor, which operates on a network of computers around the world, anonymizes traffic so that the IP address from which communication originates is masked. Tor traffic is encrypted as it hops from node to node around the world, but is decrypted at the final exit node before being delivered to its destination. Anyone operating a Tor exit node can therefore view the content of communications at that point if the packets themselves are not encrypted, and the destination IP address, even if they are.

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Afbeelding: Xochipilli