Deep Net Marketplace ‘Cannabis Road’ Hacked For 200 BTC

cannabis roadA Silk Road-like website called ‘Cannabis Road’ is the latest deep net service to be hacked. Like Silk Road, Cannabis Road resides on the deep net, only accessible through Tor. The hacker stole 200 BTC in the heist. This particular heist is interesting from a security paradigm because Cannabis Road was supposedly heading the effort to have multi-signature security for their funds. Though, Cannabis Road’s usage of multi-signature security only extended so far as to include offering multi-signature escrow to customers, though not requiring it. Other Cannabis Road security protocols include the requirement of addresses to be PGP encrypted. The future of Cannabis Road is unsure.

The Cannabis Road stolen funds are parked at this Bitcoin address. Thanks to the wonder of the Bitcoin technology, we can follow the stolen loot wherever it may flow. Silk Road 2.0, the successor to the “original” Silk Road, also suffered a larger hack in the past, and they were able to recover all the stolen funds through fees which they redistributed to their wronged users.

Cannabis Road Lead Developer

In May of 2014, Cannabis Road’s lead developer, who goes by the psuedonym – Crypto – gave an interview to DeepDotWeb. In the interview, Crypto explained that Cannabis Road is significantly different than the more well-known Silk Road. Cannabis Road only services cannabis products. On the site, Crypto doesn’t allow any other types of drugs or paraphernalia, nor does he allow weapons or carding of any sort. Crypto is the second lead developer of Cannabis Road, with the previous iteration of Cannabis Road allowing certain items that are now banned.

Previous Hacking Attempts

In February of 2014, while under the stewardship of the first developer, Cannabis Road suffered a hack that did not result in monetary loss, only reputation loss. In the DeepDotWeb interview, Crypto mentioned that Cannabis Road had already been targeted for “a few new hacking attempts.” Crypto had been handling those issues along with his team since the interview in May and throughout the summer of 2014. Cannabis Road even created a bug bounty system to provide incentive to would-be hackers to report the bug instead of exploit the bug. An opportunity to don the white hat over the black hat, one might say.

Unfortunately, all of Crypto’s security measures and hard work on Cannabis Road has hit a very solid obstacle. At this point, Crypto is unsure of the future of Cannabis Road, though he promised to remain transparent with whatever decision is made. On the Cannabis Road site, if you are so inclined to tread the waters of the deep net, only a notice and explanation remain:

At first I thought it was a mistake, until I double checked, and triple checked, only to find out, we had in fact been robbed not 15 minutes earlier!… I am deeply sorry that I have failed you as a developer and a leader, and if I can figure out how this happened, maybe you will find it in your hearts to move past this and help us bring Cannabis Road back to life once again… I don’t know if Cannabis Road will continue to exist or not at this point, because there may be no reasonable way for us to recover from this.

 

Image from Wikipedia

Exit mobile version