It was only a few months ago that Silk Road was taken offline by the FBI and it’s owner tracked down and arrested. The website offered people a place to trade in illegal goods, everything from murder to drugs seemed to be available for purchase and with the use of both the Tor network and cryptocurreny BitCoin to keep things (seemingly) anonymous, it got away with it for quite some time.
Since the site was shut down there has been a few copycat sites, as well as a few lesser sites coming out of the wood work to fill the void that was created. Now it looks even these copycat sites are being hit as Silk Road 2 moderator Defcon has reported in a forum post that the Silk Road 2 site has been hit by hackers.
He claimed that hackers have used a transaction malleability exploit to hack the marketplace, stealing 4474.26 bitcoins, with a total current value of around $2.7 million, effectively emptying the site’s escrow account. This involved using the Silk Road 2 automatic transaction verification system to order from each other, then request a refund for unshipped goods, with six users ordering and claiming from each other and submitting circular refund requests to move funds around, managing to glitch and exploit the system until they had all of Silk Road 2’s money.
Defcon is calling on the hackers to return the bitcoin. “Given the right flavor of influence from our community, we can only hope that he will decide to return the coins with integrity as opposed to hiding like a coward,” the moderator wrote.
The theft has caused the price of BTC to drop by 50 points, and despite the owner asking for his BitCoins back I can’t help but wonder that he’s wasting his time, what is he going to do, call the cops and tell him that all his drug money has been stolen?
Thank you Tech Crunch for providing us with this information.
Image courtesy of Tech Crunch.
If he offer the cops a chop I’m sure they’ll sit up and take notice, I know the South African fuzz would 🙂 $2.7 million is a fair chunk of change.