Silk Road replacement Black Market Reloaded briefly closed

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/18/silk-road-black-market-reloaded-closed

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Black Market Reloaded, a darknet marketplace in the vein of the now-shuttered Silk Road, briefly closed itself overnight following a code leak.

On Thursday, backopy, the administrator of the site which is thought be based in Russia, posted on its forums that his code base had been stolen by the admin responsible for hosting the marketplace on a virtual private server.

In the post titled “The end of the road”, backopy wrote: “This means I can't operate anymore … I'll put up in a few days a system to allow you to recover your BTC [Bitcoins], they went nowhere and I've all needed data to refund them.”

Six hours later, however, the administrator updated the post saying that “after reviewing the code and what could be compromised, I decided to re-enable BMR.”

Backopy then posted a new address for the site, but confirmed that Bitcoin transactions would still be down for a day while they checked whether the code leak had left any potential holes open.

“I hire hits on nobody, it's just sad that someone is running a VPS to peek its contents to pretend to be a hacker,” backopy added, referring to the allegations that Dread Pirate Roberts, the administrator of the Silk Road, had tried to pay an undercover police officer to kill a disgruntled employee.

Black Market Reloaded is one of a number of sites, including Sheep and Project: Black Flag, attempting to corner the market in underground bazaars for illicit products now that Silk Road has been shut down.

• <strong>The man alleged to be behind the Silk Road says he is not "excessively concerned" about his future</strong>

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