[OPSEC/Computer] Newest 2600 issue, "So, you want to be a darknet drug lord..."

Extradition treaties mean that if you're in Country A and do something that makes Country B want to prosecute you, Country A is most likely going to give you a one way ticket to Country B. If or when your box gets seized and you know the heat is on, you're going to want to beat it to a place that won't send you back, where you will presumably live out the rest of your days. Just make sure you've made enough money to grease all the right palms in your new life, or the road ahead may be extremely bumpy. If you're smart, you'll permanently move to this country well before you have any trouble with law enforcement.

One last thing before moving on: Don't be so stupid as to attempt to hire a hitman to kill anyone. Murder-related charges have no statute of limitations, which means you won't get to write a tell-all book about what a sly bastard you are when this wild ride is a distant memory. If you've reached a point in your new career where murdering people makes sense, it's time to walk away. Don't get corrupted like Dread Pirate Roberts.

  1. Technical

This section tries to be as operating system independent as possible. You'll want to consult the documentation of your OS for specifics. The technical side of running a hidden service and not getting owned by cops is a lot harder than just installing stuff and crossing your fingers. The recommendations in this section WILL NOT protect you from 0days in the wild, but should help somewhat with damage control. Remember, if they want to own your hidden service, it will probably happen eventually.

Before you even think about installing bitwasp and tor, you need to really understand how tor works. Go to freehaven.net and read the white papers until your eyes glaze over, then continue reading until you're out of papers to read. Pay particular attention to the hidden service papers. If you feel like you didn't understand something, come back to that paper again when you have more knowledge. A lot of the papers explain some of the same concepts with slight differences in the intros. Don't skim over them, because you might read someone's rewording that will clarify an idea for you. Check back with freehaven regularly. Once you're up to speed, a good next step is to keep up with the tor project's mailing lists. [1]

While you're doing all of this reading, it's (mostly) safe to go ahead and install tor on a box on your local network, purely for experimentation. Keep in mind that the NSA will start scooping up all of your packets simply because you visited torproject.org. That means don't post code questions related your drug market on Stack Exchange, if you want to avoid giving The Man morsels he can use for parallel construction. Once you've gotten hidden services working for http and ssh, you're going to take the first baby step towards evading casual discovery: Bind your hidden services to localhost and restart them.

The next step in your journey towards changing the drug business forever is to grab the transparent proxying firewall rules for your operating system to make sure they work. [2] They will guard against attacks that cause your box to send packets to a box the attacker controls, which is useful in thwarting attempts to get the box IP. You may wish to have a setup similar to an anonymous middle box, preferably without public IPs where possible, so if your application gets rooted tor isn't affected.

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