The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) appears to have used a leak in the Captcha για να καταλάβει που βρίσκονται οι servers της ναρκοαγοράς Silk Road, σύμφωνα με έγγραφα και καταθέσεις μαρτύρων που κατατέθηκαν στο δικαστήριο στα τέλη της περασμένης εβδteams.
The former FBI agent, Christopher Tarbell claimed that his service managed to locate the anonymous Silk Road servers using an IP leak found on the site's login page, containing Captcha.
Let's remind that the anonymous online drug market was offline last October, and its manager, Dread Pirate Roberts, also known as Ross William Ulbricht, was arrested at San Francisco Airport.
The Silk Road used the anonymous network Tor network to maintain its true IP address web server secret, but, according to Tarbell's testimony (PDF) the FBI spotted the Silk Road server by using the page's leak website which contained Captcha.
"The leak of the IP address came from Silk Road user login interfaceTarbell said. “After examining the individual data packets sent back from the website, we noticed that the headers from some packets reflected a specific IP address that was not associated with any of the known Tor node IPs and appeared to be the source of the packets. "
“When we entered the IP address into a regular (non-Tor) web browser, a portion of the login page Silk Road (the Captcha prompt). "Based on our training and experience, we learned that the IP indicated the IP address of the SR Server, and that the 'leak' from the SR Server was because the login page code was not properly configured to work through Tor."
Former Washington Post columnist and security researcher Brian Krebs posted excerpts from Tarbell's statement on the Krebs on Security website over the weekend, saying the mistake could be described as a "noob mistake."