TyperTech
Regular Member
- Joined
- Feb 26, 2024
- Posts
- 44
- Reaction score
- 0
- Status
- Offline
- Last Seen
"If you rely only on Tor to protect yourself, you're going to get owned and people like me are going to laugh at you."
The first tip is to not mix your dark web identity with your real one. You shouldn't work "from your mother's basement, or any location normally associated with you," and "don't talk about the same subjects across identities and take counter-measures to alter your writing style," Nachash writes.
This practice of keeping identities separate is known as "compartmentalization", and is often where cyber criminals fail. The alleged Silk Road 2 creator arrested as part of Operation Anonymous registered the server space of his site with his personal email address. This is similar to a mistake that Ross Ulbricht, the recently convicted owner of the first Silk Road made: he signed off a message advertising the site with a Gmail address which included his real name.
Next, Nachash writes, "Don't log any communications, ever. If you get busted and have logs of conversations, the feds will use them to bust other people." It's also likely that these logs, if incriminating, could be used against you in court. This is exactly what happened to Ulbricht: he had reams of chat logs between him and his associates stored on his laptop, and he also kept a diary of many of his illegal actions.
When chatting, try to give out snippets of disinformation, Nachash continues. "Make sure that if you're caught making small talk, you inject false details about yourself and your life." This is so a profile cannot be constructed of you, and help to track you down.
This is advice that hacktivist Jeremy Hammond didn't follow: while talking to "Sabu," a member of hacker group LulzSec who at this point was working as an FBI informant, Hammond gave indications on his lifestyle, such as that he went dumpster diving. Records suggest this information helped the FBI to track him down.
Even if you get this far, and happen to start actually making money on the dark web, you shouldn't then start flaunting your cash. "Living beyond your means is a key red flag that triggers financial and fraud investigations," Nachash writes.
In all, "If you rely only on Tor to protect yourself, you're going to get owned and people like me are going to laugh at you."
Or in other words, technology is not a fail-safe: if you want to remain pseudonymous online, you have to separate your multiple lives entirely, and follow some other, non-technical rules too. If you don't do that, you are going to get caught, no matter how much fancy encryption you layer on your communications.
In short - there are no friends on the darknet. You interact with these people, and you remain casual and respectful. But you have no idea who is on the other end. And you have no idea who is listening.
"Whatever you think they're doing, I guarantee it's much worse."
The first tip is to not mix your dark web identity with your real one. You shouldn't work "from your mother's basement, or any location normally associated with you," and "don't talk about the same subjects across identities and take counter-measures to alter your writing style," Nachash writes.
This practice of keeping identities separate is known as "compartmentalization", and is often where cyber criminals fail. The alleged Silk Road 2 creator arrested as part of Operation Anonymous registered the server space of his site with his personal email address. This is similar to a mistake that Ross Ulbricht, the recently convicted owner of the first Silk Road made: he signed off a message advertising the site with a Gmail address which included his real name.
Next, Nachash writes, "Don't log any communications, ever. If you get busted and have logs of conversations, the feds will use them to bust other people." It's also likely that these logs, if incriminating, could be used against you in court. This is exactly what happened to Ulbricht: he had reams of chat logs between him and his associates stored on his laptop, and he also kept a diary of many of his illegal actions.
When chatting, try to give out snippets of disinformation, Nachash continues. "Make sure that if you're caught making small talk, you inject false details about yourself and your life." This is so a profile cannot be constructed of you, and help to track you down.
This is advice that hacktivist Jeremy Hammond didn't follow: while talking to "Sabu," a member of hacker group LulzSec who at this point was working as an FBI informant, Hammond gave indications on his lifestyle, such as that he went dumpster diving. Records suggest this information helped the FBI to track him down.
Even if you get this far, and happen to start actually making money on the dark web, you shouldn't then start flaunting your cash. "Living beyond your means is a key red flag that triggers financial and fraud investigations," Nachash writes.
In all, "If you rely only on Tor to protect yourself, you're going to get owned and people like me are going to laugh at you."
Or in other words, technology is not a fail-safe: if you want to remain pseudonymous online, you have to separate your multiple lives entirely, and follow some other, non-technical rules too. If you don't do that, you are going to get caught, no matter how much fancy encryption you layer on your communications.
In short - there are no friends on the darknet. You interact with these people, and you remain casual and respectful. But you have no idea who is on the other end. And you have no idea who is listening.
"Whatever you think they're doing, I guarantee it's much worse."