Silk Road paid thousands in shake-downs from malicious hackers

When operating outside of the law, you can’t exactly rely on the police to protect your illegal enterprise from other criminals.

The Silk Road marketplace founders likely learned this lesson in 2012 and 2013, after paying thousands of dollars to cyber extortionists who threatened to expose serious site vulnerabilities or hit it with denial of service attacks, according to evidence presented in a Manhattan federal court on Wednesday.

The extortion information emerged during testimony from U.S. Internal Revenue Service special agent Gary Alford, who had subpoenaed the emails of defendant Ross Ulbricht as part of his investigation. Ulbricht is on trial at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for narcotics and criminal enterprise charges in relation to Silk Road.

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