Ever since the suspected DDoS attack in November, the admins at Silk Road have been combating a number of different scams and attacks on the site.
The Quickbuy Scam (see below) – this vendor’s image has been hacked with a fake bitcoin address
It’s hard to tell whether this is a concerted attack by one group determined to piss the website off or each one is separate. The most pervasive ones have been:
For two weeks, users of online drugs marketplace Silk Road have been unable to log in to the site more often than not, reporting timeouts, missing catchpas and other technical difficulties. Millions of dollars in Bitcoin has been inaccessible to the site’s thousands of members and trading has halted.
Where’s my Bitcoins?
The reactions of the community have run the gamut from hopeful acceptance to threats of violence against the site’s owner, admins and other random anonymous people. Amazon has stocked up on pitchforks and tinfoil hats as speculation on the forum has reached fever pitch.
Here are five of the theories for its temporary demise, in one easily-digestible blog:
On Friday I wrote an Opinion piece for The Age based on an earlier blog about why I think Australia’s proposed data retention laws are not only an invasion of privacy, they are an expensive measure that simply won’t work. Today The Age ran a longer journalistic piece about the laws.
This prompted a couple of tweets from the Twitter account that claims to represent the Australian arm of Anonymous:
Tweets by the group claiming to be the Australian arm of Anonymous
This is the same group who claimed responsibility for hacking ASIO earlier this year. Here’s the pastebin dump of ‘targets’ for hacking that they refer to in the tweets above:
