14 DAY TRIAL // More details are coming to light in the Silk Road case. It turns out that US authorities believe the Tor-based underground marketplace’s operators backed up data on a server run by JTAN, a small hosting company located in Pennsylvania.
The company openly advertises the fact that it provides services even to customers who don’t want to disclose their names and physical addresses. To facilitate this, payment in Bitcoin is accepted. This type of privacy service fits perfectly with the requirements of an online criminal service.
An affidavit obtained by The New York Times shows that the owner of JTAN is not named in law enforcement documents and he hasn’t been charged with anything.
The man, Christopher Nadovich, is the director of laboratories at the electrical and computer engineering department at Lafayette College. Nadovich has refused to comment on his company’s connection to Silk Road. However, he admits that JTAN is having financial problems.
In a notice posted on the website in late October 2013, Nadovich wrote, “The truth is, JTAN's business has declined significantly over the last decade. If current trends continue, JTAN will enter bankruptcy in 2014.”
The man is trying to sell the company, but he hopes to find a buyer that will maintain his “strict privacy policy.”
So why are the JTAN servers so important to the FBI? Authorities believe there’s lots of useful data on them about the activities of Silk Road and its alleged operator, Ross Ulbricht. The information is said to include details on narcotics transactions and money laundering.
“In analyzing the configuration of the Silk Road Web Server, the FBI has discovered that the server regularly purges data from these databases older than 60 days. Thus, the image of the Silk Road Web Server possessed by the FBI contains data reflecting only 60 days of user activity, counting back from the date the server was imaged,” the affidavit reads.
However, the backup server, namely the one provided by JTAN, doesn’t delete old data when new backups are made. This enables investigators to analyze data dating further back than just 60 days.
And it appears Nadovich has complied with the FBI’s request to hand over the server storing Silk Road backups.
“In response to the FBI’s inquiry concerning the server, JTAN.com has electronically preserved the contents of the TARGET SERVER and can produce this data to the FBI in response to the search warrant sought herein,” the document reveals.