And yet here he had.
Thankfully, there was a silver lining to the Hammond incident. Maybe it was an accident, or possibly laziness, but for some reason Hammond had not encrypted his laptop properly, and the FBI forensics lab was eventually able to get inside using a special brute-force technology that tries every password imaginable until it guesses the correct one. It took the government’s supercomputer six months to figure out that Hammond’s password was “chewy12345.” But Tarbell knew that being able to crack the code was pure luck. Most, if not all, experienced hackers and people on the Dark Web encrypted their laptops with much stronger passwords for this very reason.
Now as Tarbell sat there in the Pit talking to his coworkers about how they would approach this Silk Road case, he assured his team that if they did go after the Dread Pirate Roberts, they wouldn’t make the same mistake they had with Hammond; Tarbell would have a plan to ensure they captured DPR with his hands on the keyboard.
Chapter 35
BATTEN DOWN THE HATCHES!
The argument between the Dread Pirate Roberts and Variety Jones didn’t last long. They needed each other and knew it. But it would mark a turning point in the relationship between the two men, where there was no question that DPR was now in charge. And Jones wasn’t going anywhere, as he had warned. He was making tens of thousands of dollars a month in salary from the site and needed that money whether he liked it or not. Ross needed VJ too. He was ready to take the next step in the life of his business. It was time to close ranks and bring some corporate order to his illegal drug empire.
“I wanted to raise a topic we haven’t discussed before,” DPR wrote to Variety Jones.
Ross knew VJ would be thrown off by the comment. While the two men had no idea what the other looked like, over the past year they had discussed almost everything imaginable, from the personal to the professional. They had shared their hopes, dreams, fears, and desires and counseled each other on every aspect of those worlds. The Dread Pirate Roberts had even trusted Variety Jones enough to tell him personal things about Ross Ulbricht, explaining that he had once been a physics student in college and about having his heart broken by his old girlfriend from Texas.
So when Dread wanted to talk about something new, VJ was a bit taken aback. “Can’t imagine there is a topic we haven’t discussed before.”
But there was one, and it might have been the most important topic of all. “Local Security,” DPR wrote.
Ah, yes. That.
Ross had been working for months to try to fix security vulnerabilities, both in his life and on the site. After many close calls, including instances of hackers attacking the servers, and constantly having to move to different coffee shops and cities to cover up his secrets, he was fully aware that he had to put together a plan to protect every single area of his life that made him vulnerable.
He hadn’t been caught yet. If he was more careful going forward, Ross reasoned, he would never be caught. And given the amount of attention the site was receiving—being mentioned in hundreds of news articles a week all over the world—the people hunting him would only grow more desperate. Silk Road’s wares had expanded beyond drugs and guns to include synthetic drugs from China—among them, new forms of synthetic heroin, like fentanyl, which was up to one hundred times stronger than traditional morphine—not to mention a slew of explosives and other highly dangerous goods. So it was time to bolster his defenses and strengthen his security. He wasn’t going to take any chances.
To begin, he put Variety Jones in charge of looking into any possibility that law enforcement, or LE, as they abbreviated it, might be lurking on the site. Next Ross got to work securing other vulnerable areas of his life, including his own laptop.
First and foremost, he made sure his Samsung 700Z was properly encrypted. He had talked to VJ about this before, days after they read the news about someone being arrested for leaking information to WikiLeaks. The news reports about the bust noted that the man had used exactly the same password to log in to his computer and for his encryption software and that the FBI cracked it in no time at all.
“What a macaroon,” VJ had written.
“Weak,” Ross agreed.
“If he had a good password, they’d have nothing,” VJ said, referring to the “Feebs,” the nickname they used for the FBI. He then added that the man who had been arrested was an “idiot” for not taking security more seriously.
With this ominous lesson, Variety Jones offered some advice to DPR: You should set up your computer to automatically shut down if it hasn’t been used for a certain period of time. More important, you need to install a kill switch, where you can press a random key on your laptop that kills the machine instantly. This way, if the Feebs approach you in public, you press the key and your computer is locked forever.
Dread replied that he would do just that.
Now Ross had another question for VJ, asking if he should store his files in the cloud so his laptop was completely clear of anything related to the Silk Road. This way, if the man behind the mask were ever grabbed with his hands on the keyboard, there would be nothing that could link him to the site. “Would be nice,” DPR wrote, “to think that my laptop has nothing critical or incriminating on it.” After some back-and-forth on the pros and cons of each (the negative being that storing everything in the cloud would make working on the site painfully slow), Variety Jones suggested that Dread keep all his Silk Road files on his computer but that he encrypt them, so if his computer was grabbed by the Feebs, they would never be able to get inside.
Great idea!
“Ok, just needed to talk that through,” DPR said. “Thanks!”