Silk Road – What was it and how did it work?

One of the biggest tech stories ever, was the shutdown of Silk Road, an online black market that trafficked basically any illegal goods, from guns and drugs to private personal data and malware. The master mind behind Silk Road, Ross William Ulbricht was arrested and sentenced to life in prison.

But, how exactly do you manage to sell drugs and all sorts of illegal things online without getting caught for more than two years? Can you really buy a gun on the web as easily as you can buy something from Amazon?

Well, not exactly, but it wasn’t exactly that hard thanks to Tor and bitcoins. Here’s how Silk Road worked before the law shut it down.

Ross operated Silk Road on Tor, which is a special network on the internet designed to make it impossible to physically locate the computers hosting or accessing the websites on the network.

If you try to navigate to the Silk Road URL on a normal browser, you will get an error. To view it you need to install Tor software on your browser, although you can’t try that now since the site has been seized.

So how did Ross Ulbricht get caught in the end? Tor said that he made some mistakes in operational security and was caught by actual detective work, rather than exploiting problems with Tor.  The FBI managed to track him down in part thanks to an online post that linked to a Gmail account.

Let’s take a look at how Silk Road worked. Well, all you needed to do was install Tor, type in the Silk Road URL (you would need a username, password and country to sign up) and you would easily be inside.

Once you enter Silk Road, it’s actually just like an illegal Amazon.com! You could shop by category, whether it be “Weapons” or “Illegal Substances”, or even look through the photos of the current inventory.

A customer service section presumably provided assistance when your batch of heroin was a bit late; there were also product listings with descriptions, seller information, reviews and the famous “add to cart” button!

Silk Road relied on the virtual bitcoin currency, like Tor, bitcoins are not actually illegal, however they are often used for criminal purposes.

So, you’ve paid for your illegal products online, but how do you actually get that package in the mail? Wouldn’t you get caught if your package contained drugs or weapons? The answer is yes, possibly! It was basically just a shot in the dark; some packages might be intercepted, while others arrive safely.

The ironic thing is that Ross Ulbricht was caught in part because he had counterfeit documents shipped to him, which were intercepted by customs.

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