FINAL WORD
Arrival of anonymous
open source bazaar
Alastair Paterson of Digital Shadows explains how the dark
web is rebuilding itself with decentralised market places.
T
he takedown of AlphaBay by an
international law enforcement
investigation, followed soon
thereafter by the takedown of Hansa,
has left many wondering about the
future of dark web market places. An
erosion of trust in these more established
marketplace models will likely derail
efforts by others to fill the void quickly.
But the fact remains, sellers still need to
find customers and customers still need
access to illicit goods and services. So,
what is next for illegal, online trade?
It is important to remember that
criminal activity is not limited to the
dark web, particularly given the fact that
some countries do not extradite cyber
criminals. This is especially the case with
more sophisticated level Russian-speaking
criminals. With minimal consequences,
bad actors have no incentive to hide. As
a result, cyber crime is an Internet-wide
problem, almost equally present on the
deep and open web.
That said, it is also safe to assume
that disillusioned buyers are seeking
alternative, more secure and anonymised
methods for conducting online transactions
via the dark web. Despite the popularity
and convenience of AlphaBay for selling
drugs and credit card information, for
years cyber criminals selling sensitive data
or malware variants frequently opted for
direct peer-to-peer communication and
relationships made on specialised forums.
The P2P model provides more control and
helps safeguard against exit scams and loss
of funds, which weighed heavily on vendors
and customers.
We are now seeing a more formalised
approach to this method of trade. One
of the first fully-decentralised P2P
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marketplaces is known as OpenBazaar,
an open source project that allows the
unrestricted sale of goods between
anonymous buyers and sellers.
OpenBazaar is accessed through a
front-end client that can be freely
downloaded from the project website. All
transactions are made using Bitcoin and
are recorded on the project Blockchain as
cryptographically signed smart contracts.
This addresses problems with user
trust. If all transactions are permanently
recorded, vendors who attempt to scam
buyers can be more easily identified.
Furthermore, platform operators have no
control over listings and the platform is
split among many nodes, making it highly
resilient to law enforcement takedowns or
attacks by other criminal actors. The success
of these new marketplaces remains to be
seen and depends on these five drivers:
Alastair Paterson is CEO and Co-Founder of
Digital Shadows.
places that attract prominent vendors will
naturally become more popular.
Secure communications
Blockchain-based platforms publicly
record all messages, complicating private
messaging between users. Platforms that
can integrate secure messaging systems
without compromising performance will
attract more criminal actors.
Adoption User experience
Blockchain projects are not yet
mainstream and are not widely
understood. These platforms must become
more commonly used before criminal
actors will trust and embrace them. As with all shopping experiences,
marketplaces that can establish stable,
feature-rich interfaces that seamlessly
integrate payment platforms in this case
cryptocurrency platforms, will entice more
users. The emergence of decentralised
marketplaces within the criminal ecosystem
poses significant challenges for law
enforcement agencies and private security
vendors. Although public Blockchains can
be freely mined for data, the very high
volume of content is likely to make parsing
this information and developing actionable
intelligence very technically and logistically
challenging. Decentralised marketplaces
are not yet the dominant model, with many
buyers and sellers having moved to Dream
marketplace. However, there is growing
interest in this model.
Content control
Lack of centralised control is a double-
edged sword; it makes the platform
resilient but it also means there is less
control over the material uploaded,
opening up the door to material that
even criminal actors find objectionable.
Marketplaces that implement some level of
content control will be more attractive.
Vendor attraction
Customers want to shop at marketplaces
with successful vendors. Those market
Issue 12
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS