Agora, the largest dark web trading market, is temporarily closed

    What is the dark web? As the name suggests, the dark web is a dark and obscure place in the online world. Through anonymous tools such as Tor, dark web users can hide their tracks on the Internet. It is precisely because of this feature of the dark web that it has become a hotbed for drugs, guns and illegal pornography transactions.
However, Tor's security has been increasingly challenged in recent times. In 2013, the founder of Silk Road, the largest illegal goods trading website at the time, was arrested for running the website and was eventually sentenced to life in prison.
Recently, a professor at MIT discovered a method to track Tor network addresses by tracing data packets. This method can be used to obtain the IP addresses of servers deployed in the Tor network with an accuracy of up to 88%. If a normal browser is used in a Tor circuit, this accuracy can even be increased to more than 99%.
As soon as this news came out, Agora, the largest trading market on the dark web after Silk Road, began to get uneasy and quickly and decisively decided to temporarily close the website.
The site announced today in an announcement on Reddit that they may have found a solution to the problem:
Recent research has found some vulnerabilities in the Tor anonymity protocol that may make the server address no longer remain anonymous. Some new or known methods require a lot of resources, but new research shows that the amount of resources required may be far less than expected, and in our case, we do believe that we are interested in cooperating with people who have the relevant resources.
The website also stated in the closure announcement that ongoing transactions will not be interrupted, and transactions that have not yet started will be cleared. The website also recommends that users who have Bitcoins in their accounts on the website should withdraw these Bitcoins as soon as possible.
It is understood that Agora is currently the largest drug trading market in the dark web and was once called the "king of the dark web" by Wired. A previous investigation showed that the amount of drug transactions on the dark web was no less than $100 million. The closure of the website should be a big loss for the operator of Agora, but in order to avoid being tracked by law enforcement officers and repeating the mistakes of Silk Road, the closure of the website was a last resort.
In addition, IBM Security X-Force also released a report on this issue. IBM experts said that as Tor becomes more and more uncertain, users should stop using Tor completely.