DEF CON 21 - Unexpected Stories From a Hacker Inside the Government

meghakamra at July 08,2017
Ulbricht was caught in a very sophisticated way by police as his laptop was opened with all unencrypted files and most likely incriminating documents available, when he was arrested.

RLudwig270 at July 22,2017
I was interested in how these bitcoins get sold because I thought that if bitcoins are nearly synonymous with criminal activity (which to me, it seems like they are), it would be hard to use them to purchase things without getting investigated by the police. After some searching, it actually appears to be somewhat easy to do - you may not be able to buy many things with bitcoin, but there are plenty of buyer organizations you can sell to through online marketplaces that supposedly check your identity. Anyone know if there have been studies about what percentage of transactions using bitcoins are the result of illegal activities?

Kassandiss at July 24,2017
An interesting video, though a scary thought that the Silk Road also dealt in Hitmen, and of course it used bitcoin transactions. There really seems to be a lot of bad stuff that can be done because of bitcoins. I wonder if it outweighs the good that can be done with it. I also wonder how people learned of the Silk Road as a place they can do business anyways. Was it simply from the few posts from DPR that we saw mentioned, or was there another way? Another question I had while watching the video is that it mentioend locating some of the Silk Road servers, but they never explained how. I’m curious. On a different note, I was interested to see how much came out of and was learned because of an image. They were even able to find a gmail in a post he made and use that to eventually find DPR. I enjoyed watching the process of the investigation and eventual capture of DPR. It was very nicely laid out and explained in this video. Finally, I wonder if made instead of just shutting the Silk Road down if there could’ve been something that could’ve been done to find some of the people that used the Silk Road and arrest them, before shutting the Silk Road down.

Thely at July 24,2017
This was a very good video, and the information was presented in an organized and interesting way. The site was definitely dangerous, with people not only being able to get their hands on illegal items but they could ask hitmen to take a person out. That is a very scary thought, especially since FriendlyChemist was never found and the police had no information to go off of as there were no deaths in the time frame expected. It’s crazy how much work the FBI had to go through just to stop The Silk Road. While copy Silk Roads will appear, they wouldn’t be as big as the Silk Road was. At the very least it would take some time to grow to be as big as the Silk Road was. And it’s possible those copy sites might make mistakes that would allow the FBI to catch them. My biggest question was how the FBI started finding info on the Silk Road server from different countries, and got their hands on an image that gave them so much information.

jonathant1 at July 28,2017
The TOR network was created with the purpose of protecting information to benefit American citizens, but cybercriminals took advantage of the anonymity of TOR and used the network to profit by hosting and selling illegal content. Illegal sites on TOR make drugs, weapons, and other illicit content available to anyone with just a click of a button. Silk Road was shut down by the FBI in October 2013, but the site has resurfaced as Silk Road 2.0 and 3.0.