Tracking the Mole Inside Silk Road 2.0

derekmead writes: The arrest of the Silk Road 2.0 leader and subsequent seizure of the site was partially due to the presence of an undercover U.S. Department of Homeland Security agent, who "successfully infiltrated the support staff involved in running the Silk Road 2.0 website," according to the FBI.

Referencing multiple interviews, publicly available information, and parts of the moderator forum shared with me, it appears likely that the suspicions of many involved in Silk Road 2.0 are true: the undercover agent that infiltrated the site was a relatively quiet staff member known as Cirrus.

Comments

Lucky grab

[kamapuaa]

According to the FBI complaint against Benthall, he registered the black market bazaar's servers with the email address blake@benthall.net.

Lucky they had a mole on this inside, or they never could've taken down that criminal mastermind.

Re:Lucky grab

[hey!]

What makes you think they took down the criminal mastermind?

Remember this is the government we recently learned abducted a German citizen, beat him, chained him in the Salt Pit where he was rectally violated, only to learn they'd snatched a vacationing car salesman who happened to have the same common Arabic name as the guy they actually wanted. It was like kidnapping and anally raping "John Smiths" until you found the one you wanted.

Re:blow their minds

[ultranova]

If I ran a secret tor service site thing, I'd had 5 moderators and 1 administrator and they'd all be me just to mess with people's heads. That would prevent moles.

If I ran a secret tor site, I wouldn't publicly post my security practices, especially on a non-Tor site that doesn't even use SSL. That's the most important security...

Oh, crap.

Re:The Internet works again!

[wile_e_wonka]

This is veering offtopic, but, according to this article, thepiratebay.cr is not to be trusted, if I am understanding it correctly:

Various mirror sites of The Pirate Bay have sprung up since the site’s disappearance, but this one is different. Some alternatives simply provide a copy of The Pirate Bay with no new content (many proxy sites have been doing this for years). Others, like thepiratebay.cr, go further and even provide fake content as if it was new and even attempt to charge users.

Probably any torrent site is not to be easily trusted, but I could imagine hackers setting up a lookalike site in order to get people who should know better to download problematic stuff. Heck, maybe the CIA set it up.

Re:Seeing this information so widely disseminated

[marcello_dl]

> criminals are dumb
Indeed, They put faith in Cirrus after all the warnings about not trusting the Cloud.