Drug Trafficking Website Was Hacked to Arrest Operators

[Atreides]

Silk Road website currently displays seizure notice. Theoretically, it is impossible to find a website hosted on the Tor system. This is why there are questions over how the police managed to take it down in the early October.
 

The industry observers have their own version of how the FBI and CIA tracked down the physical location of the site servers. This one has nothing to do with the individual accused of being the Silk Road’s operator, Ross Ulbricht. Instead, the security experts think that the CIA accessed the website server via Tor, and ran an exploit on it enabling to locate it over the common Internet.

After this, the police got in touch with the company hosting it (most likely in Iceland) and then managed to take an image of the server. In addition, the FBI may also have planted tracking systems on the server enabling them to trace users who logged in to the website. This logic would certainly help to explain how the UK police arrested 4 people on suspicion of supplying controlled substances through this site.

The experts commented on a piece about the initial arrest that the major weakness of the complaint is how the site server was discovered. Their suggestion is that, since it was imaged without being noticed, the FBI (with a warrant) hacked the website sufficient to discover the site’s IP by generating a non-Tor phone-home. After this they contacted the country of the hosting provider which then got the server imaged.

Silk Road’s operator, Ross Ulbricht, faces charges of money laundering, drugs trafficking, computer hacking and even soliciting a murder. His lawyer denied all charges. However, the FBI doesn’t explain how they managed to find him. That is why suspicion is growing that the website servers were quietly hacked and exploited to reveal details about their users.

Thus far, there is still an uncertainty that might not be answered until the FBI brings its full charges to the courtroom. Perhaps, a US agency used an exploit (maybe even a zero-day one) to hack the website server and thus gain access to details about who was accessing the site. This is how they could follow the trail back to its alleged owner and users. However, the police claimed that the takedown was the result of painstaking piece-by-piece detective work. Apparently, this trial will be watched with great interest.