Dark Market Agora Shuts Down Citing Security Threat
Dark web marketplace Agora has announced it will shut down temporarily while it explores defense mechanisms against potential attacks. The marketplace attributed its decision to recent research that highlighted vulnerabilities in the Tor protocol that could lead to the identification of its servers and operators. Agora is believed to be the largest dark market website by daily transaction volume, and uses bitcoin to facilitate payment for both legal and illicit items listed by vendors. In its online announcement, Agora's anonymous administrators reported they had moved servers following....
Related News
We talk with Eduardo Robles, and along with David Ruescas, they are the main proponents of the Agora Voting project. Ferdinand Reyes: What is Agora Voting? Eduardo and David: Agora Voting is a free software voting system, born as Agora Ciudadana (Citizen Agora) in 2008 by a group of developers looking for creating a voting system useful for Partido de Internet (Internet Party). Currently fifteen persons work on this project and it has been used in two experiences in Spanish Parliament and pirate parties around the world. It is a flexible tool which can adapt to several use cases: different....
This last Tuesday, Agora announced it was halting their operations. The online black marketplace revealed that due to security concerns the site administrators decided to cease the market operations. However, contrary to what the community is used to see Agora is calling upon its users to finish up transactions in a timely manner before it closes down. Agora is an online black market or underground economy market in which goods or services are traded illegally. The goods or services themselves may or may not be illegal to own, or to trade through other, legal channels. Because the....
An automated shopping bot designed to make purchases on dark web marketplaces using bitcoin has been released after it was confiscated months ago. The Random Darknet Shopper made headlines last fall after it purchased, among other items, a supply of ecstasy pills from the dark web marketplace Agora. The bot, as well as the items it purchased, was displayed during an exhibition at the Kunst Halle St Gallen art gallery in St. Gallen, Switzerland. According to a 15th January blog post, the bot was confiscated by the St Gallen public prosecutor's office, which reportedly cited safety concerns.....
The United States government just can't quite decide whether to regulate bitcoin, or deem it a threat by declaring it a form of financial terrorism. The digital currency regulated only by mathematics is now being seen by government officials as an emerging threat, possibly to national security. According to IB Times, a counterterrorism program being conducted by the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office (CTTSO), a division of the Department of Defense (DoD), is seeking help from vendors asking for information on "state-of-the-art technologies" that could potentially pose a threat to....
Ever since the Silk Road platform came to fruition, Bitcoin seems to become a favourite form of payment across dark web marketplaces. Kripos, the Norwegian Police Service’s specialized agency, is close to concluding their largest operation – dubbed Marco Polo – against a drug ring on the dark web. The dark web is attracting all types of Internet criminals these days, and online drug trafficking is just one of the many types of business taking place. A recent sting by Kripos in Norway led to the arrest of fifteen individuals, all of whom were involved in drug trafficking on the dark web.....