Silk Road is back – and ready for business

The site became a haven for illegal goods of all kinds before the arrest of its alleged founder Ross Ulbricht. Its dramatic closure sparked panic among users and a spike in traffic to rival drug markets.

Yet now an almost identical site has been launched at a different web address, with a welcome message from Dread Pirate Roberts – the pseudonym used by the previous site’s owner.

“It took the FBI two-and-a-half years to do what they did,” a welcome message on the site reads. “As our resilient community bounces back even stronger than ever before, never forget that they… can never arrest our spirit, our ideas or our passion.”

The site is part of the so-called “dark web”, a network of pages which don’t appear on search engines like Google and are only accessible using special software.

They can never arrest our spirit, our ideas or our passion A welcome message on the relaunched Silk Road

Users of the sites claimed this software – in addition to the use of a virtual currency called bitcoin – made their transactions impossible to trace. Yet the FBI allege Ulbrich made a series of errors which gave away his identity and led to the arrests of four suspected site users in Britain.

The new owners of Silk Road claim they have improved the site’s security.

“Over the last four weeks we have implemented a complete security overhaul,” reads a message from Dread Pirate Roberts.

Technology Producer Geoff White writes:

The owners of the new Silk Road site will be hoping to cash in on the publicity that its predecessor's demise inadvertently generated. Widespread coverage of Ross Ulbricht's arrest meant a niche backwater of the internet suddenly became mainstream news - and Silk Road's rivals certainly claim to have experienced a boost in traffic.

Whoever has inherited the mantle of Dread Pirate Roberts - the name adopted by the original Silk Road's owner - is so confident of success that they have warned of a delay in processing payments on the site.

But as well as publicity, the high-profile demise of both Silk Road and its competitor Atlantis, which closed a week or so before Ulbricht's capture, has introduced a new element to the Darkweb: doubt.

Users who believed their identity and transactions were hidden have learned the hard way that they were wrong. A community of users who grew to trust not just Silk Road but the Darkweb in general have had a rude awakening.

The new site's owners will have to convince its customers to trust it again. Meanwhile the FBI might not be so slow to act this time round.