14 DAY TRIAL // Silk Road, the notorious underground market that’s known for selling drugs and other illegal goods, has been disrupted over the past few days due to a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack.
The Silk Road is highly popular among criminals because it’s only accessible via the TOR anonymity network and it uses Bitcoin to protect its customers’ privacy.
The reasons behind the attack are uncertain, but there are two main theories.
News.com.au reports that someone is trying to blackmail the site’s administrator into paying a $5,000 (€3,800) ransom.
However, according to Bitcoin Magazine, none of the posts published by Silk Road’s administrator mention anything about blackmail.
The second theory is that someone might be launching a similar service and wants to take out the competition.
Silk Road’s administrator, who calls himself Dread Pirate Roberts, reveals in a post that they “still do not have the upper hand” in the battle. He explained that it might take the restructuring of the Tor software or even the Tor network to mitigate the attack.
In the meantime, he’s considering an alternative semi-private scheme that would allow users to access the service via “many private URLs.”