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Feds Say NSA "Bogeyman" Did Not Find Silk Road's Servers

An anonymous reader writes The secret of how the FBI pinpointed the servers allegedly used by the notorious Silk Road black market website has been revealed: repeated login attempts. In a legal rebuttal, the FBI claims that repeatedly attempting to login to the marketplace revealed its host location. From the article: "As they typed 'miscellaneous' strings of characters into the login page's entry fields, Tarbell writes that they noticed an IP address associated with some data returned by the site didn't match any known Tor 'nodes,' the computers that bounce information through Tor's anonymity network to obscure its true source. And when they entered that IP address directly into a browser, the Silk Road's CAPTCHA prompt appeared, the garbled-letter image designed to prevent spam bots from entering the site. 'This indicated that the Subject IP Address was the IP address of the SR Server,' writes Tarbell in his letter, 'and that it was "leaking" from the SR Server because the computer code underlying the login interface was not properly configured at the time to work on Tor.'"

4 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. Re:With Tor you have expectation of anonymity... by sinij · · Score: 3, Informative

    No you don't have expectation of anonymity anywhere, but with Tor breaching your anonymity is prohibitively expensive for most scenarios.

  2. Re: Or so they say... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    You need the link to wikipedia so the regular folk know what youre talking about

      parallel construction

    But there is nothing you, the citizen, can do about it.

  3. Re: Or so they say... by irq-1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    You need the link to wikipedia so the regular folk know what youre talking about

    parallel construction

    But there is nothing you, the citizen, can do about it.

    Jury Nullification

  4. Re:Or so they say... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    But they were involved. Perhaps not in this specific part (and nobody was saying they were, although they most definitely did lend information to the FBI on how to go about this). They NSA, however, participated in attacks against Tor servers. They did this in two ways: first, they wrote and handled the malware that would get installed on visitor's computers, and secondly they operated the server that successful malware installations would communicate to. The FBI and CIA were only involved in actually initiating these kinds of attacks.