[tor-talk] Darknet Sites Shutdown

[tor at t-3.net]

Uhm, no. That's oversimplified.

Like someone said earlier. Only a few people arrested, but many sites 
down. Seems plausible that a clique of drug sellers got 
infiltrated/hacked and got their many darknet sites identified from 
the inside.

There is no "regardless of how it is actually done". "How it is 
actually done" is exactly the critical point, in particular if someone 
is trying to declare a plague on all Tor hidden services.

Another possibility, for example  - we don't know how well these 
darknet sites were set up. If they had the same developer(s), maybe 
more than one of the sites had a design problem and could be made to 
leak (which furthermore helped lead investigators to the clique). Or 
maybe, an ISP went snooping in a vserver and found interesting things 
(root on the vserver's host can get into a lot, including extract the 
memory contents). There are a number of plausible possibilities as to 
what-went-wrong that do not fault Tor hidden services at the core.

Those times when someone loses their ass for reasons that appear to be 
beyond Tor itself serve as a reminder to maximize 'opsec' to the best 
of your ability & in a way which scales in proportion to your privacy 
needs. Someone doing drug sites would, in theory, have a need which 
scales very high. If the skill/opsec was not proportionate,  well, 
there you go.


 On 11/07/2014 04:29 PM, Öyvind Saether wrote:
 >
 > Regardless of how it is actually done: It seems perfectly clear 
that
 > they are able to identify the servers hosting hidden services. 
Those
 > who pretend otherwise at this point are either 
cointelpro/military/law
 > enforcement or morons.