$2.7 million
By Daily Mail Reporter
PUBLISHED: 07:06 EST, 14 February 2014 | UPDATED: 07:09 EST, 14 February 2014
Silk Road 2.0 has been reportedly hacked by attackers who made off with nearly $2.7million in bitcoin - the online marketplace's entire holdings.
The trading site is a reincarnation of Silk Road, the online black market that was dramatically shut down last year following a high-profile FBI sting.
But today the site's administrator, Defcon, revealed it had infiltrated by hackers who exploited the same 'transaction malleability' that caused temporary transfer shutdowns at bitcoin exchanges BitStamp and Mt Gox this week.
Defcon is now calling on the hackers to return the bitcoin. 'Given the right flavor of influence from our community, we can only hope that he will decide to return the coins with integrity as opposed to hiding like a coward,' he wrote.
The site's users are currently attempting to track down the thief. Writes Defcon: '# Attacker 1: (Responsible for 95% of theft),' wrote one administrator. 'Suspected French, responsible for vast majority of the thefts. Used the following six vendor accounts to order from each other, to find and exploit the vulnerability aggressively.'
News of the theft has driven the price of BTC down by about 50 points, where it is hovering at 600.
The hackers stole over 4474 bitcoins, worth $2,747,000.
According to The Verge, Defcon said that a claims a vendor exploited the bug during a vulnerable moment in the site's relaunch process, initiating and hiding a flood of transactions until the accounts were emptied.
COINING IT IN: WHAT IS BITCOIN?
The relaunch process required unusually lax security procedures by the site, with little separation between vendor wallets and escrow holdings.
The report said that although the site is officially active, the administrators have implemented strict new security protocols that would make transactions significantly more difficult.
The secret Silk Road website gained notoriety as a black market drug bazaar that accepted bitcoins, an electronic currency, before federal authorities shut it down earlier this month.
It used an underground computer network known as 'The Onion Router' or 'Tor' that relays computer messages through at least three separate computer servers to disguise its users.
It was shut down following the arrest the so-called 'digital don' behind Silk Road, Ross William Ulbricht, 29, who is accused of running the website behind a military-style encryption code that enabled it to become the 'eBay' of the Internet's black market.
The FBI shut down the site on October 2nd after infiltrating it. The so-called Deep Web or Dark Web hidden website allegedly worked as an eBay for the black market - selling cocaine and marijuana, drugs, credit card numbers, instructions on how to hack an ATM and other illegal goods.
The Baltimore Sun reports that a federal indictment says a Maryland-based federal agent infiltrated Silk Road, posing as a major drug distributor who was looking for high end customers.
After selling a kilogram of fake cocaine to one of Ulbricht's co-workers using untraceable BitCoin currency, Ulbricht later confided in the agent that the employee had run off with his money.
He allegedly struck a deal with the agent - who he believed to be a major drug distributor - to have the employee tortured so that he would return the money and learn a lesson.
Later, after the former employee was arrested, Ulbricht allegedly send the undercover agent another message: 'can you change the order to execute rather than torture?'
He explained the employee 'was on the inside for a while, and now he's been arrested, I'm afraid he'll give up info.'
The feds say Ulbricht wired $80,000 to the agent.
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