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posted by martyb on Friday July 21 2017, @07:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the what's-next? dept.

An international investigation has taken down two dark web marketplaces:

Two of the largest dark web marketplaces have been shut down following a "landmark" international law enforcement investigation.

The AlphaBay and Hansa sites had been associated with the trade in illicit items such as drugs, weapons, malware and stolen data.

According to Europol, there were more than 250,000 listings for illegal drugs and toxic chemicals on AlphaBay.

Hansa was seized and covertly monitored for a month before being deactivated.

The agency said it believed the bust would lead to hundreds of new investigations in Europe.

"The capability of drug traffickers and other serious criminals around the world has taken a serious hit today," said Europol's executive director Rob Wainwright.


[Ed. addition] The US Department Of Justice announcement goes into considerable detail about the size of the site and the products carried there, as well as the agencies around the world which assisted with the takedown.

Further, Ars Technica UK explains the critical opsec mistake that lead to the takedown:

Federal officials confirmed the recent death of Alexandre Cazes, whom they said was the Thailand-based Canadian mastermind behind AlphaBay, and announced that civil forfeiture actions had also begun. That documents say that as of June 2017, AlphaBay had over 369,000 listings.

Authorities also distributed a criminal indictment against Cazes from the Eastern District of California on numerous conspiracy and drug trafficking charges.

[...] The civil forfeiture complaint outlines a crucial operational security mistake that Cazes made when he began the site in 2014. When new users signed up, they received an e-mail from AlphaBay welcoming them to the site.

"The e-mail address of "pimp_alex_91@hotmail.com" was included in the header information of the AlphaBay welcome e-mail," the court filing continues.

This e-mail address was also included in the header of AlphaBay users who lost their passwords.

Canadian authorities were able to determine that that Hotmail account was registered to a man named Alexandre Cazes with a birthdate of October 19, 1991—hence the "91." They further confirmed this e-mail address under the "Alpha02" handle (the same handle used by the head of AlphaBay) in a French language online tech forum, which included Cazes' name and his "pimp_alex_91" e-mail address.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Friday July 21 2017, @12:28PM (2 children)

    by ledow (5567) on Friday July 21 2017, @12:28PM (#542322) Homepage

    Yeah, it seems to me that in organised crime and terrorism, we only ever catch those that do stupid things like this.

    If you're going to set up a website that is basically "Organised Crime Online", then using a Hotmail address is a good idea. So long as you don't use it for anything else, and always access it via a proxy.

    It makes me wonder how much of the "dark web" is actually completely off the radar because those people are actually doing it properly and can't be traced easily at all.

    We still don't know who mined the first Bitcoins, do we? There were rumours of a discovery, but that guy turned out to just have a similar name I think. Still nobody actually knows who made it. I think TrueCrypt was in a similar position too - people pulled out of the project "for reasons unknown" and nobody really knows who was actually writing it or running it (though there are at least things like trademarks and website ownerships that could presumably be traced).

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 21 2017, @04:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 21 2017, @04:42PM (#542443)

    Regarding truecrypt, there is reason to believe it was a guy named Paul Le Roux. This is a really interesting long-form article on him:
    https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind [atavist.com]

  • (Score: 2) by sgleysti on Friday July 21 2017, @06:46PM

    by sgleysti (56) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 21 2017, @06:46PM (#542501)

    There was speculation that they received a national security letter requiring them to put a backdoor in the software and not tell anyone. One of the main messages they left read “WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues”

    The more tinfoil hat folks would add emphasis to this as follows: “WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues”

    This was a really weird thing to say, as Truecrypt was undergoing an independent audit at the time. The audit didn't find much in the way of security vulnerabilities.

    Another interesting bit was one of their latest commits adjusted the comments, and all instances of U.S. were switched to United States.

    But we have no idea what really happened. This link is interesting -- some good comments on the short blurb: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/05/truecrypt_wtf.html [schneier.com]