@briankrebs I am simultaneously amazed and unsurprised.
Unsurprised that a darknet marketplace would pull this. Seems exactly in their MO.
And amazed that sellers and buyers would share enough unencrypted information that extortion would be a significant threat to them!
Sure, a marketplace can (and in this case, has) steal all the money stored with them, but my understanding was that sellers and buyers communicated with one another mostly over PGP/GPG?
Possibly I just don't understand how these things work in practice!
@dan @briankrebs Sounds like:
Incognito market encouraged people to use PGP. They listed public keys (never mind the issues that can come with that).
They also had a built in "encryption" feature for those who didn't want to learn how to use PGP. It would encrypt your message server side with the vendor's public key.
Anyways, I guess they were recording those messages' plaintext. Those who used PGP are fine.