Dark Web marketplace Agora pauses trading due to Tor vulnerability

Dark Web marketplace Agora has announced the temporary ceasing of its operations due to vulnerability in the Tor protocol which could result in the identification of the IP addresses of the users.

"Recently research had come that shed some light on vulnerabilities in Tor Hidden Services protocol which could help to deanonymize server locations," said Agora in an online announcement. "Most of the new and previously known methods do require substantial resources to be executed, but the new research shows that the amount of resources could be much lower than expected, and in our case we do believe we have interested parties who possess such resources."

The site further said that suspicious activity has been recently discovered around their servers which they believed are attacks described in the research, and added "we have a solution in the works which will require big changes into our software stack which we believe will mitigate such problems, but unfortunately it will take time to implement.... we decided to move servers once again, however this is only a temporary solution."

It added, "At this point, while we don't have a solution ready it would be unsafe to keep our users using the service, since they would be in jeopardy. Thus, and to our great sadness we have to take the market offline for a while, until we can develop a better solution. This is the best course of action for everyone involved."

Moreover, the site also advised its users to abort any orders that haven't been sent out or processed yet, as they cannot guarantee what will happen with the orders in resolution.