The closure of two sites of sale of illegal goods by American and Dutch fonts may not long to weaken demand.
It is the latest twist in the fight against the sale of illegal items on the Internet: on July 20, American and Dutch police said have taken offline AlphaBay and Hansa two major trade sites of the "Dark web".
This operation, described by the American Minister of the Justice Jeff Sessions as "the biggest commercial place never closed on the Dark web", may however be a sword in the water.
It all starts on July 5. As reported by Wired, the U.S. Government stop in Thailand the Canadian Alexander Cazes, suspected of being behind AlphaBay, the largest market in the "Dark web". On July 12, the computer programmer of 26 years committed suicide in his cell shortly before a first hearing, reports AP. As explained in the report of the U.S. Government, Alexandre Cazes would have been identified by his email address, he sent inadvertently to new users
AlphaBay, a must-see place
AlphaBay, active since December 2014, was not a site like any other. Each day, according to the estimates of specialist Nicolas Cristin, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, the site generated an estimated turnover between $600,000 and $800,000. A "cautious" figure, says the researcher at Wired.
Since the "Silk Road" site was disappearing in 2013, the first global exchange of unsavory products, AlphaBay had become the site for buying and selling drugs of all kinds, stolen credit card numbers or weapons. His disappearance has created a shock wave in a very volatile environment where internet users protect their anonymity as much as possible before engaging in buying or selling procedures.
Hansa was managed by the Dutch police
quickly after the closure of AlphaBay, users seeking illegal products are carried forward on several sites including Hansa, hosted in the Netherlands. The site, which is much smaller than AlphaBay, announced on July 13 that he could not accommodate as many connections and had to close its doors, described Wired.
Actually, the truth is another. According to AP, Hansa has been infiltrated by the Dutch police, who runs the site since June 20. A camouflage operation that allowed the police to collect valuable data to identify the buyers and sellers and report illegal transactions in the countries concerned.
"It was finally a lot of work!" says AP Martijn Egberts, the Dutch cyber-prosecutor in charge of the investigation. "The hard part was to continue to manage the site so that no one would realize that it was us," he continues.
The myth of the "dark web"
These two closures represent a real blow to the American and Dutch governments. More broadly, for governments, the "dark web" has become the enemy to be slaughtered on the Internet. Officially "invisible", the "dark web" is simply a part of the Internet that is not accessible to classic search engines like Google or Yahoo!. This unindexed part can just as well be a private blog as sites starting with "Onion", only accessible with the Tor software, which anonymizes (relatively) Internet connections.
As well described by Wired and France Culture, the 'Dark web' is today the myth of a dark Internet, while it probably represents the essence of the Internet to debut: a decentralised networks and little or not connected to the mass of the platforms of the "worldwide web".
The demand remains extremely strong, as noted by the observers of the "Dark web", buyers quickly turned to other sites. As noted by Nicolas Cristin from Wired, after each closure, trade increases. AlphaBay thus had 300,000 references of products, which is 20 times more than The Silk Road.
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