Black Market Reloaded downtime was just a hiccup afterall

Yesterday it looked like online drug dealing had been dealt another blow, as one of Silk Road's replacements, Black Market Reloaded, was taken down after a third party server vendor outed the site's source code, potentially giving the site's owner, Backopy, a real security problem. However, less than 24 hours later, he's got the site back online under a new URL and is happy that his personal location and that of his servers, remains safe.

Posting on the BMR forums, Backopy said: “After reviewing my code over and over, I came to realise that I can still put it back up. I know I'll be facing more direct hits to secondary files, but they're all well protected and even if the attacker gets the source they won't be able to do much other than look at it. Unfortunatly as I don't know if the old certificate was compromised, I've had to change BMR's URL. Wait for more news in a short while.”

Backopy is quickly garnering himself a legendary status within the communities that surround these sites too, perhaps even eclipsing that of the previously revered Dread Pirate Roberts, who was outed and arrested earlier this month. It's not just for running a site like BMR though, but the way he's handled this potential security problem. Taking the site down at the first sign of trouble protected not only Backopy, but its many members – some of whom may still not be using PGP encryption. On top of that, he quickly created functionality for people to withdraw Bitcoins from their BMR accounts and has now brought the site back online within 24 hours of it going down. This is the sort of responsiveness and professionalism that users of these sorts of sites appreciate and it could give BMR the edge ove its main rivals, Sheep Marketplace and Deepbay.

KitGuru Says: There may be no honour among thieves, but with nerdy drug kingpins, it seems there is. 

[Thanks AtlantisBlog]

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