Internet Drugs Marketplace Closed after Bitcoin Hack
https://sp-security.blogspot.com/2013/12/internet-drugs-marketplace-closed-after.html
Sheep
Marketplace, a darknet shopping site, vanished from the web after a
catastrophic theft of 5,400 Bitcoins (approximate value of $5.8
million).
The
online service used technologies like Tor and Bitcoin in order to enable
users to purchase illegal items on the Internet. Sheep was known as one
of a spate of successors to the Silk Road website that was shut down a
month ago. Recently, visitors to Sheep Marketplace have got a notice
blaming the theft for the closure, and today its entire online presence
is gone.
The website admins say that the money was stolen by a dealer nicknamed EBOOK10, who managed to find a bug in their system. However, it is known that the service still had far more than this amount remained in its wallets after the closure, so the disgruntled users are now accusing the service of stealing from them.
Actually, the fears had already been raised over the security of the illegal service. For instance, a few months ago, the members of its subforum on Reddit found glaring holes linking Sheep and a normal website, sheepmarketplace.com, which existed as an online signpost to Sheep. The problem was that since it was an unprotected site, it allowed users to track the location of the black marketplace’s owner – the resident of Czech Republic.
Sheep wasn’t the only website of such kind to disappear: another black marketplace, Black Market Reloaded, also warned users that it was going to close down. The latter is the largest of the darknet marketplaces by turnover at the moment, but its operators are worried by that fact. They say that Tor can’t support any service to be too big, so without competition the best thing to do is to shutdown the market – in time and orderly manner.
By:
SaM
December 4th,2013
The website admins say that the money was stolen by a dealer nicknamed EBOOK10, who managed to find a bug in their system. However, it is known that the service still had far more than this amount remained in its wallets after the closure, so the disgruntled users are now accusing the service of stealing from them.
Actually, the fears had already been raised over the security of the illegal service. For instance, a few months ago, the members of its subforum on Reddit found glaring holes linking Sheep and a normal website, sheepmarketplace.com, which existed as an online signpost to Sheep. The problem was that since it was an unprotected site, it allowed users to track the location of the black marketplace’s owner – the resident of Czech Republic.
Sheep wasn’t the only website of such kind to disappear: another black marketplace, Black Market Reloaded, also warned users that it was going to close down. The latter is the largest of the darknet marketplaces by turnover at the moment, but its operators are worried by that fact. They say that Tor can’t support any service to be too big, so without competition the best thing to do is to shutdown the market – in time and orderly manner.
By:
SaM
December 4th,2013
