|
|
|
|
|
|
by jstarfish
1459 days ago
|
|
|
What sort of answer are you looking for? All of these proprietors are human. Humans make mistakes and act irrationally at times. Criminal enterprises are complex. Opportunity for mistakes increases with scale. The guy who ran Doxbin is the only high-profile case I can think of with apparent-flawless opsec, and that much only because he bailed before the long tail caught up to him. The tightest opsec I've ever seen is maintained by disability fraudsters. Privacy laws protect the evidence anybody would need to present against you, so as long as you keep doctor-hopping and never admit to anything, nobody can touch you. These people tend to be reclusive and not public-facing, but with such low risk comes low reward-- there's no real money to be made in it. (...unless you're the doctor knowingly signing off on false diagnoses. This increases scale, at which point, the more of those you write, the greater the chances of some mistake made by you or any single one of your patients bringing the whole enterprise down.) |
|
|
They said that some of the 3 I listed by name had "great opsec". I am curious which one of those they thought was great, and laid out why I think the opsec in these cases was really far from "great".
Maybe when they said "those listed", they were referring to the list on the website and not my list. In that case, I misunderstood and obviously my comment doesn't make much sense. But I presumed they were referring to my list.
>Humans make mistakes and act irrationally at times. Criminal enterprises are complex.
Agreed on both fronts.
But I think that the severity of mistakes is a scale, and some of the really big players on the darknet have made mistakes that I argue is much closer to the "really dumb mistake, trivially avoided" end of the scale, such as using your LinkedIn email to run your multi-million dollar black market.
>Opportunity for mistakes increases with scale.
Agreed. But none of the three examples I listed by name were affected by scale. Using outdated software with known vulnerabilities, posting your own email, and using an email connected to your LinkedIn are all not issues of scale.
Edit to clarify, as I think people may be misunderstanding me (maybe? hard to tell from just downvotes and no replies):
Opsec is hard. 100%. You have to maintain it basically forever, which makes it really hard.
But, if I walk into a bank intending to rob it and start shouting out my full name and address (or, say, left my drivers license at the scene), people would have a jolly laugh at how bad of a robber I was. This is analogous to using the same email to run your multi-million dollar black market as well as sign up for a LinkedIn account. Most people would agree that in my hypothetical, the robber made some really trivial mistakes. I'm not sure why it's so hard to say that for these darknet operators that basically did the same thing, but in computer form.