Illegal Internet Market Shut Down

Last November, a website popularly known as Silk Road 2.0 ( https://silkroad6ownowfk.onion) on the “dark web”  of was taken down & its alleged online administrator Blake Benthall(@blakeeb on twitter), a software developer, arrested ( as in, its servers seized) as part of operation Onymous in a joint operation between 16 member nations of Europol, the FBI, and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“Dark web” is a part of “deep web”. The sites we browse are a small fraction of the internet- there’s below the surface something atleast 4000-5000 times larger- the deep web. This part of the internet is not indexed by search engines, i.e. you cannot find them through a simple Google search. These may be sites that don’t want its content showing up on search engines through various methods. They may also be used for personal records, archives, secret communications & at times ven crime.

They can only be searched through special search engines like Deep Peep, still not displaying meaningful content. Most such websites would open up only when certain strings are passed to them & a dynamic website would load then. Certain among them have .onion suffixes that cannot be opened directly & can be accessed via VPNs or TOR.

TOR, short for The Onion Router, was originally designed to bypass surveillance & censorship & is used widely by activists to protect their privacy. However you could also access deep web websites using it.

Now, the dark web is that part of the deep web that is mostly used for criminal activities- sale of illegal arms, drugs, stolen credit card information, etc. Some such popular sites are Evolution & Agora. There was a Silk road that was taken down sometime back. Very soon Silk Road 2.0 came up. Before being taken down, Silk Road 2 was estimated to be selling $8 million/month worth of illicit goods with more than 150,000 active users. For a comparative idea, flipkart recently crossed the $3 billion/year. That would make it a bigger marketplace than flipkart, that too working in illegal sales alone. And it had been around for just an year!

An undercover Homeland Security agent was put in Silk Road 2.0′s and work his way up. Through that operation, the agent said he was able to interact directly with Defcon, code name for Blake. This will be pretty damning for Blake in his hearings as then tracing bitcoin transactions Silk Road 2 accepted payments in would be irrelevant.

There’s already a Silk Road 3.0(http://reloadedudjtjvxr.onion/login.php) accessible only through TOR & the like) though & Evolution and Agora which have always been more popular exist. Also certain criminals are using Open Bazaar, listing their products as legal ones but selling them in code names, the way drugs are sold in the offline market.