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The Technologies That Betrayed Silk Road's Anonymity
itwbennett writes Silk Road was based on an expectation of anonymity: Servers operated within an anonymous Tor network. Transactions between buyers and sellers were conducted in bitcoin. Everything was supposedly untraceable. Yet prosecutors presented a wealth of digital evidence to convince the jury that Ross Ulbricht was Dread Pirate Roberts, the handle used by the chief operator of the site. From Bitcoin to server logins and, yes, Facebook, here's a look at 5 technologies that tripped Ulbricht up.
Looks like I might have my shot at being a multimillionaire.
Rusty treated OpSec as suggestions instead of law.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
If I were running a criminal enterprise via my computer, wtf would you go out in a public place and do so? At least sit in your car or something.
Why would I have a facebook account?
Why would I be advertising on facebook for people to join my enterprise?
Why would I keep logs of any sort?
There is so much stupid here, it hurts. Some "Dread Pirate" he turned out to be.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Not much really needs to be said.
The advantages to Encryption and defense-in-depth strategies is they are based on the triad of information assurance, one key of that is "non-repudiation". The "downside" to non-repudiation is the ability to connect the dots come litigation time. Interesting that they mention that the SSH sessions used key based authentication when the opposing attorneys claimed that anyone can name their systems "frosty" and use the login name "frosty". My question is, did the key on the laptop that was supposedly logged in as "frosty" also correlate to the key on the server? If so, the "anyone" list just got a lot smaller.
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
Also, this whole story probably is BS.
They used some classified NSA method (I can think of at least two major approaches) and now they spread some BS in order to cover their REAL methods.
"Parallel Construction" at work.
I think the knee-jerk response is to say that the problem exists between the chair and keyboard. Just reading the article makes it impossible to draw another conclusion. He was nabbed in a public library before he had a chance to turn his laptop off so nothing was encrypted. Similarly, ARE YOU TAKING NOTES ON A CRIMINAL FUCKING CONSPIRACY? Why would you ever keep data in plain text even if the hard drive is encrypted? I am not expecting the FBI to raid me at any time, but just out of caution, I have my computer encrypted using Bitlocker (yeah, I know) and all data at rest is stuck in a hidden TrueCrypt partition. If I want to access it, I have to sign in separately. But most hilariously, he had a stupid freaking Facebook page that linked him directly to his true identity and Silk Road.
However, this only underscores how difficult it is to have operational security for any complex business. At some point, he needs to keep track of all transactions, with reasonably easy access. It's a pain in the ass for me to repeatedly log in and access data. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to conduct business. I guess the bottom line is that physical security is crucial.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Looks like he was done in by being stupid more than the technologies.
The article is more than a little sensational too. "He was done in by CHAT!" No, he was done in by keeping a goddamn log of his criminal activities. The fact that it happened to be chat is beside the point. Probably the only entry in there that deserves the headline is the Bitcoin one, only because it highlights how people misrepresent Bitcoin (It's so anonymous that every single transaction ever is recorded on the internet!). The article points out that he could have used tumblers to hide his bitcoins, but with the volume of coins Silk Road deals with that probably wasn't practical. Tumblers are really only useful for relatively small numbers of coins at a time. Put too many in and take too many out and your transactions stand out.
The article does harp a lot on how this information was only available because Ulbrict was dumb and let his laptop be snatched out of his hands while he was logged in. It is somewhat frightening to consider how poor the government's case might be if he had simply been facing the other direction.
I read the internet for the articles.
This seems like a perfect use of parallel construction: figure out who he is by using illegal/secret technologies, and develop a plausible narrative of how legal methods were actually used. Maybe we are jumping too quickly to the "He was stupid" conclusion.
Oh boy, that is what they want ***YOU*** to think.
Just read how Churchill ordered "recon planes" to "mysteriously" show up five minutes before the bombers dropped the ordnance on the u-boats.
He fooled Admiral Dönitz with that method.
You don't need parallel construction when they seized his lap top.
All of this is based on the seizure of his lap top.
The bit coins, the chat logs, the encryption keys, the SSH logins.
If they didn't seize the lap top in tact, they would have had a much more difficult time with this. It would have been he said/she said buried in tech gobbledygook.
But they did get his lap top, in tact, in plain text. I imagine getting the lap top was primary goal of his arrest. They'd probably have let him run and catch him later, if they could get his lap top.
And once they got that lap top, the world opened up for them. He was laid bare.
His most trusted ally ratted him out. It's that simple.
Someone named rossulbricht@gmail.com revealed himself as one of the first people who knew about Silk Road. Item #4 in TFA. (Could be lying/misinformation, but it is a plausible explanation.)
Variety Jones, perhaps the true mastermind behind Silk Road, had the perfect level of involvement. He was disconnected and impossible to track, which means he ran this empire through a patsy. This isn't meant as an insult to Ulbricht. It's too hard to do everything right at that level of involvement. Jones's mistakes only had negative ramifications for Ulbricht. You could say that his only error that might come back to him was that he didn't explicitly tell Ulbricht to keep logging disabled for his Tor chats, which allowed Jones's writing habits and estimates of his schedule (time zone) can be analyzed and perhaps mapped to his other (less obscured) online activity in a manner similar to Ulbricht's Facebook notes about Thailand.
Who knows, perhaps Jones, who was quite arguably the true architect of Silk Road, is now serving the same capacity in another similar enterprise.