News in the Cyber Realm

In yesterday's news conference at the Justice Department it would have been hard to tell what the purpose of it was, since all the press could ask about was the President's comments the day before about his own Attorney General.  Ill timed, and ill advised as those comments were they gave the press an opportunity to avoid talking about the good thing that they were there to announce- taking down two parts of the Dark Web, and doing it in an interesting way.  

I had already heard about it from Krebs on Security which described the sequence of events better than the press release from the Justice Department.  AlphaBay was a thriving drug and almost anything else illegal, website which was taken down first.  When customers started to move their business elsewhere, a good bit of it went to Hansa Market, which for the previous month had been operated by the Dutch Police.  This is a classic sting operation.

I remember one of our local car dealers who was caught pushing drugs from his back door.  The police caught him and allowed him to operate for another year while the brought in cameras to record buyers and suppliers of drugs.  This kind of cooperation bring down a whole network of people who know each other and traffic in things besides drugs- guns almost always come into it - and in that case, stolen cars too.  The complexities of drug running became known to us all after the case broke.

There were 200,000 people using this website, which is far from an Amazon-like operation.  But, the sting gets users, dealers, and the website operators all at once.  For months after the car dealership went public, we were hearing about new drug cases that were being brought from leads that came from the sting.  Two-hundred thousand is a lot of users, but tracking down their real names from the addresses on the website (they have to deliver it somewhere) will take a long time.  Tracing the dealers themselves is harder, even in the locality where I live.  These guys tend to want to not be found.  So, months from now, we will be hearing about this or that drug dealer was arrested and we will probably not even know it was tied to AlphaBay.

It shows the basic concept of not hurrying to make an arrest.  Patience, which is rare in some prosecutors, is a virtue.  This required international cooperation over a long time, and with almost complete secrecy.  Several foreign law enforcement agencies were involved.  It should have been a good moment for the Justice Department which has not had too many.  Too bad the press couldn't focus on the work that was done.