Security News > 2022 > April > Serious Security: Darkweb drugs market Hydra taken offline by German police
German police have located and closed down the servers of Hydra, allegedly one of the world's biggest underground online stores.
According to a report from the BBC, locating the actual servers used to run Hydra was not an easy task, but German police said they started following up on a tip in the middle of 2021 that suggested the servers were actually hosted in Germany.
If the final server is itself a darkweb server on the Tor network, identified by one of those mysterious URLs that end with.
Loosely speaking, in a true darkweb connection, the final server connection is handled as a fourth hop in the Tor chain, which rather neatly adds anonymity at both ends.
In this case, Tor wasn't enough to prevent the location of the alleged Hydra servers being tracked down and "Repurposed" by law enforcement, as happened when the BKI replaced the Hydra home page with the site seizure message shown above.
In conjunction with the shutdown of Hydra, announced criminal charges against Dmitry Olegovich Pavlov, 30, a resident of Russia, for conspiracy to distribute narcotics and conspiracy to commit money laundering, in connection with his operation and administration of the servers used to run Hydra.