In 2017, the FBI together with the Dutch Police authorities managed to close the Dark Web drug market, Hansa. Yesterday, the Dutch national television presented all the details of how the Dutch Police managed to close the infamous website.
2016, the Bitdefender first reported that Hansa, one of the most popular marketplaces on the Dark Web, was hosted somewhere in the Netherlands. Hansa's popularity piqued the interest of the authorities, who began looking for ways to shut down the site, and arrest those involved.
Its markets Dark Web, such as Hansa, sell drugs, stolen credit card information and various other prohibited goods or services.
Anonymity is ensured through Tor, but also the bitcoin used in transactions.
"We wanted people to know that you can not count on the anonymity of the internet to commit crime - even on the Dark Web," Gert Ras, head of the Netherlands National High Tech Crime Unit, told the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit this year. week.
Let's see how the authorities moved.
In October 2016, the police managed to create a copy of Hansa's private server on their network. By researching the data they found chat logs and thus managed to locate two of the site's administrators, nationals of Germany.
When they contacted the German police, they were told that both were already under investigation for running a pirated ebook distribution business. However, the investigations made Hansa managers suspect that something was amiss. That's how they transported him server outside the jurisdiction of the Netherlands.
However, administrators used the same Bitcoin wallet to pay for the new server hosting company as the wallet they used for the server in the Netherlands. So the website was found to be hosted in Lithuania.
Police were able to gather a wealth of information, including the size of traffic from Hansa servers, the names of the four administrators and their login details to the private chat service they used.
Then came the FBI. The Fed at the same time had managed to close another large drug market, the Dark Web Alphabay, and discovered that some of the site's infrastructure was hosted in the Netherlands. The authorities of the two countries agreed to cooperate in a cunning plan. They would initially close Alphabay, and wait for Hansa to fill up, so they could capture more.
So on June 20 of last year, the page began to operate with administrators from the Police authorities. The two German administrators were arrested at their homes and interrogated. They quickly admitted her mode of the site and handed over the login credentials for their accounts, allowing the police to take full control of Hansa's servers.
So with administrator accounts they could see every transaction, the shipping addresses, but also any additional information given by the sellers so that the buyers would not be caught.
Immediately after a special unit team, took over the project. EUROPOL and other EU police authorities have been notified to make all arrests.
On July 4, they arrested Alphabay's administrator, gaining access to both an unencrypted laptop and codeof access. The next day the page was shut down and its members started moving to Hansa.
The traffic was so heavy that they had to stop new registrations for a while because the servers could not handle it.
On July 20, during a simultaneous interview in the Netherlands and the United States, it was announced that the servers had stopped working. Police seized more than 2.500 Bitcoins and recorded details of more than 26.000 transactions. Hundreds of arrests followed.
