Silk Road 2 — the follow-up dark web marketplace that took the place of the now-infamous Silk Road run by Dread Pirate Roberts — has reportedly been hacked. The news was first reported by DeepDotWeb.

The news was delivered by ‘Defcon’ on the Silk Road 2 forums (TOR link):

I am sweating as I write this.

Christmas brought grave news. I cannot adequately express how deeply honored I was by your unconditional support of my staff.

I do not expect the same reaction to today’s revelations. This movement is built on integrity, and I feel obligated to be forthright with you.

I held myself to a high standard as your leader, yet now I must utter words all too familiar to this scarred community:

We have been hacked.

Defcon notes that no information has been leaked and no server access was obtain by the attacker(s).

“Our initial investigations indicate that a vendor exploited a recently discovered vulnerability in the Bitcoin protocol known as “transaction malleability” to repeatedly withdraw coins from our system until it was completely empty,” he wrote in his message to users of the marketplace. “Despite our hardening and pentesting procedures, this attack vector was outside of penetration testing scope due to being rooted in the Bitcoin protocol itself.”

He continues:

I have failed you as a leader, and am completely devastated by today’s discoveries. I should have taken MtGox and Bitstamp’s lead and disabled withdrawals as soon as the malleability issue was reported. I was slow to respond and too skeptical of the possible issue at hand. It is a crushing blow. I cannot find the words to express how deeply I want this movement to be safe from the very threats I just watched materialize during my watch.

A result of the hack, user funds in escrow have been stolen.

It takes the integrity of all of us to push this movement forward. Whoever you are, you still have a chance to act in the interest of helping this community. Keep a percentage, return the rest. Don’t walk away with your fellow freedom fighters’ coins. DPR2 returned the cold storage. I didn’t run with the gold. But two people alone cannot move us forward. It takes an entire community committing to integrity – and though this crushing blow will not stop us, it sure is a testament to how greedy some bastards truly are.

“Never again store your escrow bitcoins on a server.”

“Silk Road will never again be a centralized escrow storage,” said Defcon. “This week has shown the collateral damage we can cause by being a huge target and failing in just one unforeseen area.”

One attacker was responsible for 95 percent of the theft, according to Defcon. The individual, suspected to be French, used six vendor accounts “to order from each other, to find and exploit the vulnerability aggressively.”

Two others, both suspected to be Australian, were said to be responsible for the other 5 percent of the theft.

Damage done

It’s unclear just how much of user funds in escrow were stolen, but general talk in the community pegs the figure to be in the thousands of BTC. Elsewhere, reports suggest 88,000 BTC was stolen, but we cannot confirm this number, nor did Defcon’s message to users mention this figure. Certainly, the community surrounding the illegal marketplace is not surprisingly in a state of shock.

Update: Computer security researcher Nicolas Weaver pegs the amount stolen to be in the neighborhood of 4474.266369160003BTC — nearly $3 million USD at the time of this writing.

[via DeepDotWeb]

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