Josh Valcarcel/WIRED
In the digital drug trade as in the physical one, taking out one kingpin only makes room for another ready to satisfy the market’s endless demand. In the case of the FBI’s takedown of the Silk Road, the latest of the up-and-coming drug kingpins is far more evolved than its predecessor—and far less principled.
Since it launched early this year, the anonymous black market bazaar Evolution has grown dramatically, nearly tripling its sales listings in just the last five months. It now offers more than 15,000 mostly illegal products ranging from weapons to weed, cocaine, and heroin. That’s thousands more than the Silk Road ever hosted. And Evolution’s popularity has been driven not only by a more secure and professional operation than its competitors, but also by a more amoral approach to the cryptomarket than the strict libertarian ethos the Silk Road preached. Case in point: About 10 percent of Evolution’s products are stolen credit card numbers and credentials for hacked online accounts.
That development represents an unsavory departure from the Silk Road’s rule that only “victimless” contraband could be sold through its anonymous black market—a sign that the traditional cybercriminal underground sees an opportunity to merge its identity theft business with the widening online trade in narcotics.
“It’s moved well beyond victimless crime,” says a researcher for the non-profit Digital Citizens Alliance who closely tracks dark web markets and asked not to be identified for legal and security reasons. “The libertarian ideals behind Silk Road were about giving everyone free choice. Now it’s gone past drugs to fraud. It’s just about making money.”
Evolution remains slightly smaller than the two largest online drug markets, the reincarnated Silk Road known as Silk Road 2 and newcomer Agora, which recently surpassed the Silk Road in total product listings to become the new most popular market on the dark web.
Even as Evolution has exploded, though, Silk Road 2 has stagnated at around 17,000 product listings. Users and vendors have come to see Evolution is far more honed than its competitors, says a security researcher who goes by the name Grifter and gave a talk about the state of the dark web at the hacker conference Defcon last month. He points to numbers from the website DarkNet Stats that show Evolution is online 96.4 percent of the time, compared to 93.5 percent for the Silk Road 2 and a mere 79.5 percent for Agora. Evolution’s page-load times are far faster, often nearly as fast as sites not hosted on Tor. These features are rare feats on the dark web, where traffic must be encrypted and bounced through three of Tor’s computers around the world, and hackers frequently bombard sites with so-called denial of service attacks designed to knock competitors offline.
“Evolution is certainly my personal favorite,” says Grifter. “The site offers something better, and word is getting around.”
Unlike other drug markets, however, the 4 percent commission on every purchase made on Evolution helps finance a major player in the identity theft industry. Evolution shares at least one founder—who goes by the name Verto—with another site known as the Tor Carding Forum, or TCF. That older site, a private forum that charges $50 to join, has long maintained a brisk trade in stolen financial details.
Little is known about Verto, but he seems to have little in common with the so-called Dread Pirate Roberts, the creator of the Silk Road now alleged to be the 30-year-old Ross Ulbricht currently jailed in Brooklyn, New York. When I interviewed the Dread Pirate Roberts under his pseudonym last year, he described the Silk Road as a libertarian experiment designed to give people the ability to buy anything that doesn’t impinge on someone else’s rights. (In his private professional dealings, Roberts may not have been so peace-loving. The FBI has accused him of paying for the murder of six people including a possible informant and a blackmailer, but hasn’t yet proven those claims in court.)
“We don’t allow the sale of anything that’s main purpose is to harm innocent people, or [for which] it was necessary to harm innocent people to bring it to market,” he told me. “I want to be able to pursue my dreams and live my life as I see fit, unhindered by others, and I want others to have the same freedom.”
Evolution has no such “do-no-harm” clause. Its “forbidden goods” page bans child pornography, “services related to murder/assassination/terrorism,” prostitution, ponzi schemes, and lotteries. But it sells a variety of weapons, and as with Verto’s older Tor Carding Forum, it declares open season on victims of identity theft.
Unlike other drug markets, the 4 percent commission on every purchase made on Evolution helps to finance a major player in the identity theft industry.
Verto is also, unsurprisingly, less talkative than his Dread Pirate predecessor. When WIRED reached out to him and another Evolution administrator named Kimble, only Kimble responded: “I’m sorry, but we’ll have to kindly refuse your offer.”
One factor in Evolution’s success no doubt has been the Silk Road 2′s misfortune: the larger site took a major blow when its administrators claimed last February that hackers had stolen $2.7 million worth of users’ bitcoins. Despite using its own profits to since reimburse around 80 percent of affected users, it has yet to win back the drug-selling community. Its number of product listings actually fell since its hack, and have only recently recovered, according to the Digital Citizens’ Alliance numbers.
Evolution, by contrast, has used clever security measures designed to prevent that sort of heist. Like the Silk Road, Evolution accepts only bitcoins and runs on the anonymity software Tor to prevent its users or itself from being tracked by law enforcement. But it also implements a bitcoin feature called “multi-signature transactions.” When users make a purchase on Evolution, they can place their bitcoins in an escrow account created by the site. Control of that account is shared by the site’s administrators, the buyer, and the seller; two out of three of those parties must sign off on the deal before the coins can be moved again. That makes it far more difficult for buyers and sellers to scam each another, and prevents coins from being stolen by the site’s operators or seized by law enforcement.
In another innovative security trick, the site also offers its own version of two-factor authentication: When the feature is switched on, anyone logging in is required to decrypt a message with the private PGP key kept on their hard drive.
Such features seem to have pulled buyers and sellers in by the thousands, outweighing any squeamishness around Evolution’s theft-friendly policies. As the site quickly gains users, the Digital Citizens Alliance worries it represents an erosion of the principles of the lucrative online drug trade, whose profits could now fund markets for far nastier crimes. The group’s dark net-focused researcher points to Tor-hidden sites that have attempted, for instance, to offer assassinations in exchange for bitcoin, though without much apparent success. “It’s an interesting evolution that’s going on, no pun intended,” he says. “After credit card fraud, what’s the next thing?”
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