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| A screenshot of Sheep before it was closed down. |
Sheep disappears from the internet after admins report a Bitcoin hack - but users accuse them of absconding with 20 times that Sheep Marketplace, a darknet shopping site, has shut down following a
catastrophic theft of 5,400 bitcoins, currently valued at over £3.5m.
The site uses technologies such as Tor and Bitcoin to enable users to
purchase illegal goods online, and is one of a spate of successors to
the Silk Road site which was shut down in October. For a few days,
visitors to Sheep received a notice blaming the theft for the closure,
but now its entire online presence has been removed. Sheep's administrators claim that the theft was carried out by a dealer
with the username EBOOK101. "This vendor found a bug in our system and
stole 5,400 BTC your money, our provisions, all was stolen," they
wrote in the online message.
Fears had already been raised over the security of the site. In October,
members of the Sheep Marketplace subforum on social news site Reddit
discovered glaring holes linking Sheep and an apparently unofficial
normal website, sheepmarketplace.com. The latter existed as an online
signpost to the former, but because it was an unprotected website, it
let users discover the location of the black marketplace's owner.
Following the closure of Sheep, a second black marketplace, Black Market
Reloaded (BMR), also announced that it would be closing down. BMR is
currently the largest of the darknet marketplaces by volume of goods on
sale, but its admins are worried by that fact.
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