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This differs from stories that I've heard, like how they used a plainclothes female agent yelling at him to throw him off so they could grab his laptop. http:/

by halviti 12y ago

This differs from stories that I've heard, like how they used a plainclothes female agent yelling at him to throw him off so they could grab his laptop. http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/dead-end-on-silk-road-internet-crime-kingpin-ross-ulbrichts-big-fall-20140204 http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/dead-end-on-silk-ro... Why leave out these details, I wonder? It makes for a much better story. Also, this article leaves out all of the details on how they found him. Presumably the FBI found the server from the unsecured captcha page... but these claims have been shown to be false http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/10/silk-road-lawyers-poke-holes-in-fbis-story/ http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/10/silk-road-lawyers-poke-ho... Which still leaves everyone wondering how the FBI legally found the server in the first place. This is the part of the story that I would like to see more about.

drzaiusapelord 12y ago
I guess its in the FBI's interest to not reveal their novel tactics. I imagine a lot of LE "hacking" is social engineering tricks like stealing laptops. Why try to crack crypto and deal with overseas servers when you can just physically grab data. I've also read about a lot of these dotcom criminals suddenly getting an entourage of female admirers. Seems like a perfect way to place a female agent to flirt out his secrets. The INTJ male is impressive in his technical ability but is a complete nightmare socially. LE knows this and exploits it. > IP the government visited wasn’t providing the CAPTCHA, but instead a PHPMyAdmin interface Ulbricht from a technical perspective seems pretty unimpressive as well. Looks like he had some basic sysadmin and business skills but may not have really understood netsec on a high enough level to protect SR from LE. phpmyadmin open to the world? Even using phpmyadmin on a secure server is a very poor practice. Those are major amateur moves. Who knows how many other amateur moves he made.

by halviti 12y ago

drzaiusapelord 12y ago

I guess its in the FBI's interest to not reveal their novel tactics. I imagine a lot of LE "hacking" is social engineering tricks like stealing laptops. Why try to crack crypto and deal with overseas servers when you can just physically grab data. I've also read about a lot of these dotcom criminals suddenly getting an entourage of female admirers. Seems like a perfect way to place a female agent to flirt out his secrets. The INTJ male is impressive in his technical ability but is a complete nightmare socially. LE knows this and exploits it. > IP the government visited wasn’t providing the CAPTCHA, but instead a PHPMyAdmin interface Ulbricht from a technical perspective seems pretty unimpressive as well. Looks like he had some basic sysadmin and business skills but may not have really understood netsec on a high enough level to protect SR from LE. phpmyadmin open to the world? Even using phpmyadmin on a secure server is a very poor practice. Those are major amateur moves. Who knows how many other amateur moves he made.