Dark web drugs site Silk Road knocked offline by hacker

An "underground" website famed for selling drugs and other illegal items has been targeted in a cyberattack.


It appears the site suffered from a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack over the course of Tuesday and Wednesday.

Silk Road is only accessible through Tor, a service which allows users to browse anonymously online.

Several US politicians have called for the marketplace to be shut down, without success.

DDoS attacks involve flooding a website with more traffic than it can handle, therefore knocking it offline.

After two days of intermittent service, Silk Road's administrators told users on Wednesday morning the site was back in action - but said they could not rule out further downtime.

"Silk Road is open and accessible," said the site's administrator, writing under the user name Dread Pirate Roberts.

"As soon as the attacker finds out, he will likely change his tactics and try to take the site down again.

"Hopefully he won't be able to, but time will tell."

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