Agora, an online marketplace where items ranging from illicit drugs to forged documents are bought and sold, is indefinitely shuttering its doors on the Dark Web due to supposed security concerns.
The administrators of the underground bazaar said Tuesday that operations are on hold as a result of recent studies regarding the security of the protocol that allows websites to be run anonymously on the so-called “Dark Web,” a massive portion of the Internet that isn’t indexed by search engines such as Google and can’t be accessed like ordinary sites and services.
“Recently research had come that shed some light on vulnerabilities in Tor Hidden Services protocol which could help to deanonymize server locations. Most of the new and previously known methods do require substantial resources to be executed, but the new research shows that the amount of resources could be much lower than expected, and in our case we do believe we have interested parties who possess such resources,” the message begins.
The site was still online as of Wednesday, and its administrators said they are trying their best to clear all outstanding orders as soon as possible. Users who have accounts on Agora containing unspent cryptocurrency have been told to withdraw their funds while the site is on hiatus.
Agora was launched in 2013 and until now was thought to be the longest-running black market of its kind. The site was estimated to be generating upwards of $500,000 in sales every day, according to research published this month out of Carnegie Mellon University, and its offerings of goods and services at any time could range from counterfeit clothing and fake IDs to MDMA, cannabis, cocaine and an assortment of contraband.
Silk Road, a similar marketplace that got its start in 2011, was shut down two years ago as part of an FBI operation that also netted the arrest of its operator, Ross Ulbricht. Silk Road 2.0 was launched in its place soon after but once again was broken up by law enforcement. Ulbricht is serving a life sentence for charges related to his role with the site, and suspected Silk Road 2.0 administrator Blake Benthall is currently awaiting trial.
Sites on the Dark Web can exist as “hidden services” that require the specialized Tor browser in order to be reached. Researchers have routinely raised questions about the security of the technology involved, however, with the authors of one recent paper claiming they discovered “crucial weaknesses in the design of hidden services” that allowed them to “break the anonymity of hidden service clients and operators passively.”
“I wouldn’t trust a Tor hidden service farther than I could throw the server. Not in 2015,” Matthew Green, a cryptology professor at John Hopkins, wrote on Twitter after Agora announced the hiatus.
On Tuesday, Agora’s operators said they are working to bring the site back online with new security measures but acknowledged it’s too soon to tell if and when.
“At this point, while we don’t have a solution ready, it would be unsafe to keep our users using the service, since they would be in jeopardy. Thus, and to our great sadness we have to take the market offline for a while, until we can develop a better solution. This is the best course of action for everyone involved,” the administrators said.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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