‘Non-Stop’ Attacks Crippling Silk Road Drug Site

The notorious Silk Road website, which sells many kinds of illegal drugs over the Tor network, continues to be battered by attacks today, which have seen the site downed for periods.

Silk Road was inaccessible for two days earlier this week, and whilst it is back online now, it is not accepting any new registrations. That could hint the site was hit by an application layer attack focused on its login page.

The site’s founder Dread Pirate Roberts has posted on a Silk Road forum today that the “attacks have been coming non-stop”.

Silk Road downed

“We’ve been able to keep the site open more than half the time with only minor issues such as limited image uploading for vendors,” Roberts said.

“Every hour we are making progress and I am feeling much more confident that we will come out on top within the next few days. Still, expect some unannounced down-time here and there.”

Silk Road has plenty of enemies, from politicians who have called for it to be shut down to rivals running competitive services. There was speculation either side could be funding the attacks.

However, according to a separate post on the forum, Silk Road has been caught up in a widespread extortion campaign, in which targets are being threatened by DDoS unless they pay anything from $3000 to $10,000.

Bitcoin-related sites have also been targeted, the post claimed. Bitcoins are used to buy illegal goods over Silk Road.

The posts also suggests there is $10,000 offered to anyone who can help provide information that will lead to the attacker’s capture.

The other big question is how a DDoS could have hit an Onion-based site, given attackers have to go through various “hops” of IP addresses to get to the target website IP.

Roberts hinted the attackers had found a way of exploiting the Tor network, which routes traffic randomly across servers to provide anonymity, to hit Silk Road.

“It’s looking more and more like a restructuring of the tor software or even the tor network will be required to mitigate the kind of attack we are under,” he wrote.

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