Part Two
TWO years before the People’s Republic of China (PROC) announced the revival of the “Silk Road,” the world was introduced to its online version.
But the year that the PROC announced the launch of its “One Belt, One Road,” the online black market and the first modern Dark Net market Silk Road was shut down. While PROC’s Silk Road is focused on trading in construction materials, automobile, power and iron and steel, among others, the online version traded in illegal drugs.
The online marketplace was shut down after the arrest of Ross Ulbricht whom the Federal Bureau of Investigation accused to be the founder of Silk Road.
A research in 2014 has said “the very existence of an online cryptomarket for illegal drugs is a criminal innovation: it provides drug dealers with a virtual location to advertise and sell their products to a worldwide market, to do so anonymously, and to a great extent out of reach of law enforcement.”
“This market functioned successfully because it was part of the hidden or ‘Deep Web,’ where all communications are anonymized by The Onion Router [Tor] service,” wrote authors by Judith Aldridge of the University of Manchester-School of Law and David Décary-Hétu of the University of Montreal-School of Criminology.
Asian scenario
AS far as Asia is concerned, the scenario is not encouraging as the “Dark Side” is becoming a strong force.
“Asia hasn’t advanced as much as the West in adopting law-enforcement monitoring capabilities, so these Dark Markets [remain] a haven for illicit activities,” F5 Networks Inc. Principal Threat Research Evangelist Raymond Pompon said.
Pompon said dark markets thrive where law enforcement is weak. He cited Manila as a haven of a major cybercrime lord.
“Paul Le Roux is the perfect local example of the dangers of a Dark Market. The former developer of TrueCrypt became an underworld crime-boss in Manila. He made millions selling illegal prescriptions in the Dark Market, and ultimately ordered the grisly assassinations of six Filipinos, including his own real-estate agent,” Pompon said in reply to questions sent via e-mail.
Le Roux, a Zimbabwe national by birth, wore many hats in his colorful life. Online reports described Le Roux as a former computer programmer, former criminal cartel boss and informant to the US Drug Enforcement Administration.
He is credited with developing the Encryption for the Masses software, which was first released on December 18, 1998. Le Roux has claimed the product has the power to encrypt entire disks and given the option of plausible deniability (denying the existence of an encrypted volume). Moreover, Le Roux claimed the software had been written “from scratch.”
‘The Mastermind’
EVAN Ratliff wrote in his article “The Mastermind,” published in the Atavist Magazine, that Le Roux became famous online through engaging in the Internet pharmacy business, specifically selling prescription drugs to Americans.
Le Roux profited from the business, earning him hundreds of millions of dollars, Ratliff wrote.
He added that Le Roux invested his profits into a wide ranging criminal activities—cocaine dealing, arms dealing, gold and timber smuggling, money laundering and selling technology to pariah states—around the world. In the course of business, he’d arranged the murder of at least half a dozen people, according to Ratliff.
Ratliff travelled to the Philippines and Israel, linked up with sources deep within Le Roux’s former criminal empire and obtained exclusive documents revealing Le Roux’s background, his operations and his cooperation with US authorities.
Threats to IT
POMPON’S F5 Networks colleague David Holmes said AlphaBay is another example of dark markets operating in emerging markets.
Holmes, F5 Networks Worldwide Security Evangelist, said AlphaBay emerged as the world’s largest dark net after authorities in the west shut down Silk Road.
AlphaBay dealt in weapons, stolen Uber credentials, narcotics and stolen identities using Bitcoin and Monero as currencies, Holmes said. The founder Alexandre Cazes, was reported to have absconded with the holdings of several criminals operating through AlphaBay.
After his identity was leaked, Cazes was found dead in a jail cell in Bangkok last July. The official report cited the cause of death as “probably suicide.”
“We are also seeing a rise in child pornography [such as the Peter Scully case]and counterfeit medication production in the Philippines,” Holmes said. “There is also a lot of Bitcoin activity being brokered though that area, as well.” The discovery of trade in illegal drugs and marijuana through social-media platforms is just the tip of the iceberg, he added.
Nonetheless, Holmes and Pompon said they are not yet seeing cybercrime and trading in the Dark Net overwhelm any burgeoning technology development. Still, they admit these can divert attention away from legitimate enterprises and potentially drive away
foreign investment.
“An environment that supports a rising tide of cybercrime can also be drain on local tech talent if there are no legitimate ways for youngsters to apply their skills to make money,” Holmes said. “This has already happened in high-tech, low-opportunity and low-enforcement places like Russia and Brazil.”
Bulletproof hosting
TO combat cybercrimes and the Dark Markets, the F5 Networks officials suggest countries with “lesser tech-capabilities” to form partnerships with other nations that have more advanced cybercrime capability. Since cybercrime does not recognize boundaries, it is in everyone’s interest to help each other out and seek help when it’s needed, according to Holmes. A major part of that component should include recruiting and training local cybercops and private sector cyber-defenders.
“This [requires] support from the government in the form of outreach, resources and appropriately written legislature,” Holmes says.
Holmes also do not want to see the growth of “bulletproof hosting” Internet service providers (ISPs) in the region. He expressed this concern because “there are ISPs that are more lenient and tolerant of illegal activities on their hosted infrastructures.”
“Bulletproof hosters often become ‘Botnet Command and Control’ networks,” Pompon said. “Not only does this stain a country’s reputation, it can lead to network traffic being shunned globally, which consequently can hurt legitimate Internet businesses.”
Bulletproof hosting refers to a service provided by some domain hosting or Web-hosting firms that permits their customer a huge degree of leniency in the kinds of material they may upload and distribute. As a result, the leniency has been exploited by spammers and providers of online gaming or illegal pornography.
To be concluded
Image credits: Jimbo Albano