SR1 was DDOS attacked by the government months before market shutdown: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/11/silk-road-other-tor-darknet-sites-may-have-been-decloaked-through-ddos/
Operation Onymous / SR2 DDOS speculation: http://www.experienceproject.com/stories/Want-To-Talk-About-Privacy-And-The-Internet/5117309
What Defcon (Silk Road 2.0 admin) is truly guilty of: - registering his VPS with his eponymous email account -> it's like he wasn't even trying...
But it still doesn't explain how they located the server, and the servers of the 26 other onion sites.
Most plausible theory so far: The FBI threw money at the problem. They rented enough servers to host a ton of Tor relays, DDOS attacked the targets thus forcing the connections through the FBI-controlled nodes to unmask the real IPs.
And actual DDOS attacks from that era? https://www.dailydot.com/business/cyberwar-deep-web-silk-road-2/
The latest attacks came after weeks of heavy distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks repeatedly brought both markets to their knees, interrupting service for days at a time and costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. Filling a void
One month after the much-discussed fall of the original Silk Road, version 2.0 was launched to great fanfare.
The attacks
Competition between the two sites was uneventful until approximately one week ago when Silk Road 2.0's ten thousand users suddenly couldn't access the site. Vendors itching for a product and junkies itching for a fix felt the pain of the outage that, for a time, went unexplained.
There is plenty of precedent for such an attack on the Deep Web. The original Silk Road suffered harsh DDoS attacks numerous times through its life. What happened next, however, had never taken place on the original website.
Dread Pirate Roberts, the new leader of Silk Road 2.0, spoke privately with his vendors, accusing TorMarket of orchestrating a week-long attack against the website. Word leaked to the public that DPR had evidence of TorMarket's involvement but it was never released.
Silk Road 2.0 wasn't the only black market being denied service. Pandora, a fledgling market attempting to carve out a niche, experienced outages as well at the beginning of December.
A few days after Silk Road was knocked out of service, TorMarket went down, and would continue to go down for days at a time--courtesy of yet another DDoS attack. This attack was fundamentally different from the one that had taken down Silk Road. Whereas Silk Road's entire server came under fire, it appears that only TorMarket's entry nodes were affected during the attack, allowing some users to access the site even as the denial persisted.
Due to the anonymous nature of the Deep Web, it's impossible to tell how the DDoS may have affected each site's security. A few theories being floated suggest that any aggressive actor--be it law enforcement or a skilled hacker--could use the attack to gain unauthorized access to black market databases.
The only thing we know for sure is that the outages have cost the Deep Web's biggest drug dealers a lot of money.
Remember when AlphaBay was being DDOS attacked before it was taken down? /r/AlphaBayMarket/comments/6lf6aq/alphabay_being_ddosd/
These were probably effort to locate the server. Now look at all the DDOS attacks on the current markets. Is it not reasonable that this current full press attack it is a government effort to locate the remaining unfound servers? Thoughts?
I reckon the DDOS is smoke and mirrors and targeted requests are being slipped through simultaneously. Whether or not it's law enforcement carrying out the attacks is another question, as it could just as easily be well organised cyber criminals or even a state, in an effort to gain access to crypto currency. I think the days of DDOS being used simply as a means of disruption are long gone. Will be interesting to see how everything plays out.