{"id":17248,"date":"2014-11-07T07:01:12","date_gmt":"2014-11-07T07:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/huge-raid-to-shut-down-400-plus-dark-net-sites\/"},"modified":"2014-11-07T07:00:58","modified_gmt":"2014-11-07T07:00:58","slug":"huge-raid-to-shut-down-400-plus-dark-net-sites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/huge-raid-to-shut-down-400-plus-dark-net-sites\/","title":{"rendered":"Huge raid to shut down 400-plus dark net sites"},"content":{"rendered":"

{Silk Road 2.0 and 400 other sites believed to be selling illegal items including drugs and weapons have been shut down.}<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

The sites operated on the Tor network – a part of the internet unreachable via traditional search engines.<\/p>\n

The joint operation between 16 European countries and the US saw 17 arrests, including Blake Benthall who is said to be behind Silk Road 2.0.<\/p>\n

Experts believe the shutdown represents a breakthrough for fighting cybercrime.<\/p>\n

Six Britons were also arrested, including a 20-year-old man from Liverpool, a 19-year-old man from New Waltham, a 30 year-old-man from Cleethorpes and a man and woman, both aged 58, from Aberdovey, Wales.<\/p>\n

All were interviewed and bailed according to the National Crime Agency.<\/p>\n

Tor is home to thousands of illegal marketplaces, trading in drugs, child abuse images as well as sites for extremist groups.<\/p>\n

Silk Road 2.0 – which launched in October last year – is one of the most notorious and deals in the buying and selling of illegal drugs.<\/p>\n

It was resurrected after the original Silk Road site was shut down and its alleged owner arrested.<\/p>\n

‘Serious organised crime’
\nThe operation also saw the seizure of Bitcoins worth approximately $1m (\u00a3632,000).<\/p>\n

“Today we have demonstrated that, together, we are able to efficiently remove vital criminal infrastructures that are supporting serious organised crime,” said Troels Oerting, head of Europol’s European cybercrime centre.<\/p>\n

“And we are not ‘just’ removing these services from the open internet; this time we have also hit services on the dark net using Tor where, for a long time, criminals have considered themselves beyond reach,” he added.<\/p>\n

The BBC understands that the raid represented both a technological breakthrough – with police using new techniques to track down the physical location of dark net servers – as well as seeing an unprecedented level of international co-operation among law enforcement agencies.<\/p>\n

The so-called deep web – the anonymous part of the internet – is estimated to be anything up to 500 times the size of the surface web.<\/p>\n

Within that experts refer to the dark net – the part of the network which Tor operates on. There are approximately three million Tor users but the number of sites may be smaller.<\/p>\n

Alan Woodward, a security consultant who advises Europol, said that the shutdown represents a new era in the fight against cybercrime.<\/p>\n

“Tor has long been considered beyond the reach of law enforcement. This action proves that it is neither invisible nor untouchable,” he said.<\/p>\n

But, he added, it did not mean copycat sites would not spring up, or that the police had thrown light on the dark net.<\/p>\n

line
\nExplainer: What is Tor?
\nTor is a special part of the internet that requires software, known as the Tor Browser bundle, to access it.<\/p>\n

The name is an acronym for The Onion Router – just as there are many layers to the vegetable, there are many layers of encryption on the network.<\/p>\n

It was originally designed by the US Naval Research Laboratory, and continues to receive funding from the US State Department.<\/p>\n

It attempts to hide a person’s location and identity by sending data across the internet via a very circuitous route involving several “nodes” – which, in this context, means using volunteers’ PCs and computer servers as connection points.<\/p>\n

Encryption applied at each hop along this route makes it very hard to connect a person to any particular activity.<\/p>\n

To the website that ultimately receives the request, it appears as if the data traffic comes from the last computer in the chain – known as an “exit relay” – rather than the person responsible.<\/p>\n

More on {{BBC}}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

{Silk Road 2.0 and 400 other sites believed to be selling illegal items including drugs and weapons have been shut down.} The sites operated on the Tor network – a part of the internet unreachable via traditional search engines. The joint operation between 16 European countries and the US saw 17 arrests, including Blake Benthall […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2000054871,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[75],"byline":[170],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-17248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science-technology","tag-homenews","byline-igihe"],"bylines":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"contributors":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"featured_image":{"id":2000054871,"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton17248.gif","alt":"","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/gif","width":0,"height":0,"sizes":{"thumbnail":{"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton17248.gif","width":1,"height":1},"medium":{"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton17248.gif","width":1,"height":1},"medium_large":{"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton17248.gif","width":1,"height":1},"large":{"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton17248.gif","width":1,"height":1},"full":{"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton17248.gif","width":0,"height":0}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17248\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2000054871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17248"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=17248"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=17248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}