The top Silk Road advisor known as Variety Jones, whose real name is Roger Thomas Clark, was sentenced today to 20 years in prison, according to a press release by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. The sentencing caps off one of the few remaining threads of the Silk Road story. Authorities in Thailand arrested Clark in December 2015, around 2 years after the FBI apprehended the underground drug market’s creator Ross Ulbricht in October 2013. Clark provided Ulbricht with advice on all aspects of the enterprise, including urging a murder-for-hire scheme, the press ..read more

Elon Musk said one reason he took over Twitter is his (easily disputed) beliefs in free speech. Twitter, he said, serves as the de facto public town square. Despite Musk subsequently making all manner of questionable content moderation decisions that throw cold water on his alleged free speech stance, a new one stands out: Twitter’s onion service, a version of the site that could be accessed even in countries that have banned Twitter, is now offline. The bastion of free speech has killed one of the few real, anti-censorship tools it had. “​​As of yesterday, March 6th, 2023, the certificate has ..read more

Library Genesis (LibGen), the largest pirate repository of academic papers, doesn’t seem to be doing so hot. Three years ago, LibGen had on average five different HTTP mirror websites backing up every upload, to ensure that the repository can’t be easily taken down. But as Reddit users pointed out this week, that number now looks more like two. After the recent takedown of another pirate site, the downturn has caused concern among “shadow archivists,” the term for volunteer digital librarians who maintain online repositories like LibGen and Z-Library, which host massive collections of pirated ..read more

Michael Goldberg, a 36-year-old man who sold meth on the darkweb under the name “Drugs R Us,” is going to prison. As first spotted by Dark Net Daily and detailed in court documents, Goldberg ran a criminal organization with his wife and a few other associates. According to the criminal complaint, Goldberg and his associates purchased drugs from various sources and then shipped them internationally using UPS, DHL, and the United States Postal Service. Goldberg and company weren’t sneaky and the authorities first figured out something was up in 2018 when they discovered several parcels intended ..read more

Five men believed to be behind the web’s most notorious murder for hire scheme were arrested in Romania this week, in part of an operation aimed at putting an end to the infamous dark web scam.  Since its inception in the 2010s, the operation has funneled users searching for ways to hire an assassin online to a site on the dark web. That site has gone by a series of different names; Besa Mafia, Camorra Hitman, and, most recently, the #1 Hitman Marketplace. Once there, users were asked to submit their target, information about how and when they would like them killed, and to pay a fee, typ ..read more

German authorities have shut down and seized the servers of Hydra, one of the largest dark web marketplaces.  On Tuesday, Germany’s Central Office for Combating Cybercrime (ZIT) and the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) announced the operation in a press release where they called Hydra “the world’s largest illegal darknet marketplace,” according to a Google translation of the announcement. The authorities said the seizure and shut down was done on the basis that Hydra facilitates the purchase of illegal drugs and money laundering, and the investigation was conducted by several German a ..read more

One of the world’s most wanted pedophiles, who abused dozens of children between the ages of two and 16, has been captured and jailed for close to 50 years after Australian authorities tracked him down to a COVID-19 quarantine facility in Malaysia. For at least 14 years, Alladin Lanim was found to have sexually abused dozens of children in a sleepy, seaside town called Lundu in Sarawak, Malaysia.  The 40-year-old man posted his heinous activities on the dark web and boasted on message boards about recording his acts, according to a detailed report published by the Sydney Morning Herald ..read more

Multiple websites linked to the infamous ransomware gang REvil are currently offline, according to multiple security researchers. REvil is the group linked to the recent hack of information technology firm Kaseya which an REvil affiliate used to then ransom a wealth of other companies around the world. "Onionsite not found," an error message currently reads when visiting REvil's dark web site where the group ordinarily posts data stolen from victims. Lawrence Abrams, owner of information security publication BleepingComputer, said in a tweet that the downtime extended to "all" of REvil's sites ..read more

A scammer used a fake court order to convince a domain registrar to transfer ownership of a domain that lists dark web drug markets, and then used that to point the sites to their own copies of the markets designed to steal peoples' bitcoin. Hackers often make lookalike sites of dark web markets, but the use of a fake court order is unusual. It bears some similarity to how scammers use fake trademarks to convince Instagram to transfer ownership of valuable usernames. "I had 2FA and PGP enabled on that account. I am not an idiot when it comes to security," Dark Fail, the pseudonymous admin of t ..read more

The FBI paid a non-profit organization focused on unmasking child predators $250,000 for access to a series of hacking tools, according to public procurement records viewed by Motherboard. The news provides more insight into how the FBI obtains some of its hacking tools, or so-called network investigative techniques (NITs). The contract also highlights the close relationship between private parties and the FBI when hacking suspects. Facebook, for example, previously bought a hacking tool for the FBI to use to unmask one of the social network's users who was aggressively targeting minors on the ..read more