Dream Market: Are You Famous? Yesterday Europol announced that the FBI, the DEA and the Dutch Police collaborated in an investigation aimed at shutting down AlphaBay and Hansa. Today rumors are circulating that its third largest illegal market Dark Web, Dream Market, stopped operating, after the intervention of the Authorities.
Some Redditors they discovered an unencrypted IP address on the source code of Dream, which many users interpret as a sign that law enforcement agencies may have taken control of the drug-market and that they actively monitor the platform.
While these allegations have not yet been verified by more reliable sources, the underground community coordinators support Reddit for their initial suspicion.
Meanwhile, users are still discussing whether this is indeed the case. According to many publications, visible IP in the source code has been there for at least nine months, and some of them have been able to detect the address at Swedish Speedstepper hosting company.
Others argue that displaying a public IP address is not an expected behavior for Dark Web. As more paranoid publications have pointed out, simple errors like these have caused the closure of other illegal Dark Web purchases in the past.
Mentioning that a public IP address exists in the source code of a website on the Dark Web is a very serious vulnerability that makes it easy for authorities to locate the "service". In this way the authorities can locate the servers and gain full control without the knowledge of the sellers and buyers.
In fact, this is exactly the strategy used by the Dutch police undertook to monitor and eventually shut down the Hansa drug market.
What makes Dream a perfect goal for the authorities is that without AlphaBay and Hansa, drug vendors and buyers have probably turned to that website to continue their business.
Yesterday Dutch Police said that after AlphaBay was shut down, the Hansa drug market saw an eightfold increase in daily transactions – from 1.000 to 8.000. The same motif it is very likely to be repeated in the case of Dream as well.
