
#Torchat law enforcement software
Internal communication was carried out mostly through free software called TorChat. Thousands of pages of chat logs helped prosecutors trace the growth of Silk Road. Ulbricht either didn’t use the tumbler, or if he did, it didn’t help. Silk Road offered a service, called a tumbler, that passed bitcoins through several intermediate wallets to obscure their origin and destination. In Silk Road’s case, prosecutors found it relatively trivial to track profits from Silk Road as they were transferred from wallets used by the online market to wallets on Ulbricht’s laptop. This case showed that all law enforcement needs to do is locate the wallets on each side of a transaction and follow the money. But unlike cash, a detailed public ledger called the blockchain keeps track of each wallet a bitcoin passes through. Like cash, bitcoins aren’t tied to a person’s identity. If you assume your bitcoins can’t be traced back to you, think again. How was Ulbricht nabbed? At least some of the blame can be placed on what now seems like misplaced trust in a handful of technologies Ulbricht thought would shield his identity. Yet prosecutors presented a wealth of digital evidence to convince the jury that Ulbricht was Dread Pirate Roberts, the handle used by the chief operator of the site. Transactions between buyers and sellers were conducted in bitcoin.

The market Ulbricht built was based on an expectation of anonymity: Silk Road servers operated within an anonymous Tor network. He could serve 30 years or more behind bars. Ross Ulbricht was convicted in a Manhattan federal court last week for his role operating the Silk Road online marketplace. Retrieved 19 December 2016.Pro tip for any would-be online drug kingpins: Don’t post vacation pictures on Facebook.

"Malware Exchange Busted by the Feds Relaunches, At Least in Name". "Hackers Hack Hacking Forum As Soon As It's Launched". "Darkode: FBI shuts down notorious online forum and cracks 'cyber hornet's nest of criminal hackers' ".

"Cybercrime forum Darkode returns with security, admins intact". "Hacker forum Darkode is back and more secure than ever". ^ "Cybercriminal Darkode Forum Taken Down Through Global Action".Lizard Squad, a hacking group, said to have used dark0de.On December 13, a version of the site returned on the original domain name. Researchers from MalwareTech suggested the relaunch was not genuine, and almost immediately after, it was hacked and its database leaked. Only two weeks after the announcement of the raid, the site reappeared with increased security, employing blockchain-based authentication and operating on the Tor anonymity network. On Monday, September 21, 2015, Daniel Placek appeared on the podcast Radiolab discussing his role in starting Darkode and his eventual cooperation with the United States government in its efforts to take down the site. Upon announcing the 12 charges issued by the United States, Attorney David Hickton called the site "a cyber hornet's nest of criminal hackers", "the most sophisticated English-speaking forum for criminal computer hackers in the world" which "represented one of the gravest threats to the integrity of data on computers in the United States". According to the FBI, the case is "believed to be the largest-ever coordinated law enforcement effort directed at an online cyber criminal forum". The forum was the target of Operation Shrouded Horizon, an international law enforcement effort led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation which culminated in the site's seizure and arrests of several of its members in July 2015. In April 2014, various site users were attacked via the Heartbleed exploit, gaining access to private areas of the site.

The site has had an ongoing feud with security researcher Brian Krebs. In early 2013, it came under a large DDoS attack moving from bulletproof hosting provider Santrex to Off-shore, the latter being a participant of the Stophaus campaign against Spamhaus.
