How did the FBI manage to locate the Silk Road servers , and how did they manage to connect them to Ross Ulbricht, who is alleged to be their administrator, according to the indictment? Rumors in hacker circles suggest that the CIA – with or without the help of the National Security Agency ( NSA ) – managed to hack the server through Tor , and somehow ran an exploit that helped them locate the server on the “normal” internet.
Once they had done this, they contacted the company hosting the server (perhaps somewhere in Iceland, as we will explain below) and in this way obtained an image of the server's disks. They could also have placed surveillance systems on the server that allowed them to track everyone who connected to Silk Road. The latter scenarios may explain how British police were able to arrest four men last week on charges of drug trafficking via Silk Road.
Nicholas Weaver, from the International Computer Science Institute, said when the news leaked to the media that the authorities' biggest difficulty will be when they are called upon to explain in court how the Silk Road server was exposed.
His own suspicions are that the server was hacked by the authorities who then contacted the company hosting it. In this way, they were able to copy the server's disks and examine them in peace, without shutting it down. The server continued to operate and so no one was scared to try to erase their traces.
But according to an affidavit filed last week by FBI agent Christopher Tarbell, that's not how it happened. He says that through Ulbricht's LinkedIn profile, they discovered a photo that was the same as one found on a package of fake IDs that were "caught" at the Canadian border.
The FBI agent's deposition also describes how his colleagues monitored Silk Road and how they discovered messages posted on the site's discussion forum via WordPress blogs and by a user named "Altoid," whom they were able to link to a Gmail address belonging to Ulbricht.
Tarbell's description, of course, does not contain all the evidence one would expect for an arrest – and a major discovery – of this magnitude.
Another issue that hasn't been widely reported is that the original affidavit didn't describe what the FBI was basing the case on. It only described how an indictment could be constructed that would convince a judge to sign an arrest warrant.
This is why it raises suspicions that Silk Road were hacked very discreetly, to reveal more details of its members.
The suspicions are reinforced by the comments of the commander of the UK's NCA, Keith Bristow, who said of the arrest of the four Britons that "the hidden internet is not hidden and your anonymous activities are not anonymous. We know where you are, what you are doing and we will catch you."
Some argue, meanwhile, that the Silk Road server may have been hosted in Iceland, as reported by Runa Sandvik , from the Tor Project. As she stated after research she discovered that the server in Iceland with IP https://193.107.86.49, which has a self-signed certificate, redirects to the domain silkroadvb5piz3r.onion – under which the Silk Road website existed.
More generally, there is uncertainty about what evidence the FBI will bring to the courtroom. If it is proven that an exploit or a zero-day vulnerability was used, the entire case may collapse.
