Hackers like to play the cynical, world-weary intellectuals, but an awful lot of them still seem to go down with knives in their backs. More to the point, they often spend brief periods defending those who did the stabbing, refusing to be taken in by “government lies” about divisions in their precious community. The stubborn, almost sentimental refusal to quarantine friends is what felled many important members of Anonymous, and what brought down prominent international criminal organizations like Carders Market. The Deep Web provides a fog of war that can be exploited by anyone — by criminals to operate markets and discussion forums, by police to attack them, and by anyone at all to rob them blind.
Yesterday, one of the operators of the Silk Road posted a long and emotional comment to the dark market’s official forums which laid out the situation: “We have been hacked.” Somewhere between $2.4 and $2.7 million in Bitcoins has disappeared from the Silk Road’s custody thanks to — well, it depends who you believe. Earlier this month, the largest Bitcoin trader Mt. Gox made waves by refusing to continue direct Bitcoin withdrawals due to an alleged “bug” in Bitcoin’s fundamental design. The bug, called transactional malleability, could theoretically allow canny attackers to trick a wallet into thinking that a transaction has been denied, causing the wallet to resend the payment. Using this bug, someone was able to completely empty the Silk Road’s escrow account.
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