The Rise and Fall of Major Dark Web Markets: A Brief History of Silk Road, AlphaBay, and Hansa.

Silk Road

Silk Road is an anonymous online marketplace that commenced operations in February 2011. Unlike a conventional shop, Silk Road functions as an infrastructure, facilitating transactions between sellers and buyers in an online environment (Christin, N., 2013).

Silk Road not only served as a platform for accessing substances but also as a tight-knit global community deliberately structured for social cohesion. The forum established an entry barrier called "the newbie board", requiring users to spend time understanding the community before joining larger conversations. New users had to contribute at least 50 comments or posts in this designated space before engaging in discussions. Advancement within the forum hierarchy was tied to active participation and contribution, with users' "karma scores" reflecting the quality of their comments. In addition, vendors and administrators held distinct status profiled, setting them apart from regular users (Lacson, W., & Jones, B., 2016, pp.46-49).

The marketplace was overseen by a mysterious founder known as the "Dread Pirate Roberts" and successfully evaded global law enforcement for nearly two consecutive years, until the FBI eventually seized the site in October 2013 (Lacson, W., & Jones, B., 2016).

Figure 1: The home page of Silk Road (Christin, N., 2013, pp. 2013)

Operation Bayonet (Hansa and AlphaBay)

Operation Bayonet, conducted in 2017, was a multinational law enforcement effort that dismantled the largest markets in operation at the time: AlphaBay and Hansa. While the police in the Netherlands were actively running Hansa as a honeypot, users migrated from the seized Alphabay to Hansa and Dutch law enforcement was able to capture personal details about incoming users due to the site's prior reconfiguration (Grauer, K., & Jardine, E., 2023).

Figure 2: The shutdown of Hansa and AlphaBay (Europol, 2017).

• Hansa and AlphaBay

The 10-month investigation into Hansa, the largest European Dark Web marketplace a the time, commenced with a tip from a security company's researchers who believed they had located a Hansa server in the Netherlands data center of a web-hosting firm. When the Dutch police began their pursuit in the fall of 2016, they opted for a unique strategy: rather than taking down the site, they aimed to take it over, hoping to undermine trust in the Hansa system. This approach allowed them to identify the two alleged administrators of the Hansa marketplace, both located in Germany. The operation carried out by the Netherlands National High Tech Crime Unit stands as one of the most successful blows against the dark web, resulting in the confiscation of millions of dollars worth of bitcoins, over a dozen arrests, and the acquisition of a vast database of Hansa user information (Greenberg, A., 2018).

Figure 3: The home page of Hansa (Lewis, S. J., 2017)

During the ongoing investigation by the Netherlands National High Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU), the FBI reached out to inform them about the discovery of one of the servers for AlphaBay in the Netherlands. At that time, AlphaBay outweighted Hansa in size. American investigators were closing in and sought to dismantle AlphaBay. However, the Dutch police swiftly recognized that following the shutdown, users would likely seek out a new marketplace. Their foresight proved accurate, and after the closure of AlphaBay, its users flocked to Hansa, unknowingly under police control (Greenberg, A., 2018).

Figure 4: The homepage of AlphaBay (Internet Archive, 2016).

Over the next month, the Dutch police capitalized on their position at the apex of Europe's largest dark web market to conduct increasingly aggressive surveillance on its users. They modified the site's code to know every user's password and introduced a feature that automatically encrypted messages with users' PGP key, secretly logging each message's full text before encryption. This tactic enabled them to capture buyers' home addresses as they communicated with sellers, obtaining data on 420,000 users, including 10,000 addresses, which were then provided to Europol (Greenberg, A., 2018).

References:

Christin, N. (2013). Traveling the Silk Road: a measurement analysis of a large anonymous online marketplace. ACM Digital Library. https://doi.org/10.1145/2488388.2488408

Lacson, W., & Jones, B. (2016). The 21st Century DarkNet Market: Lessons from the Fall of Silk Road. International Journal of Cyber Criminology (IJCC).

https://www.cybercrimejournal.com/pdf/Lacson&Jonesvol10issue1IJCC2016.pdf

Grauer, K., & Jardine, E. (2023). Cryptocurrencies and drugs: Analysis of cryptocurrency use on darknet markets in the EU and neighboring countries | www.emcdda.europa.eu. https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/drugs-library/cryptocurrencies-and-drugs-analysis-cryptocurrency-use-darknet-markets-eu-and-neighbouring-countries_en

Massive blow to criminal Dark Web activities after globally coordinated operation | Europol. (2017). Europol. https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/massive-blow-to-criminal-dark-web-activities-after-globally-coordinated-operation

Greenberg, A. (2018). How Dutch police took over Hansa, a top dark web market. WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/hansa-dutch-police-sting-operation/

Lewis, S. J. (2017). OnionScan Report: Reconstructing the Finances of Darknet Markets through Reputation Systems. Mascherari Press. https://mascherari.press/onionscan-report-forensic-finances-dark-markets/

AlphaBay : Free download, borrow, and streaming : Internet Archive. (2016). Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/AlphaBay/1-alphabay-index.png