Password managers and Ross Ulbricht’s mistake

You may have heard of Silk Road and its creator, Ross Ulbricht, an American. It was the largest underground marketplace and seemed to be anonymous and impregnable to visitors.

The main instrument of payment between users was the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. In a year, Silk Road sold $14–15 million worth of goods.

In early October 2013, the administrator of a major illegal substance site went to the public library, a place he probably thought was safe.

He had no idea that a number of agents were accompanying him and waiting for him to decrypt his disks and password files.

Ross Ulbricht was concerned about his security and kept all of his valuable data in a cryptocontainer. Despite the many ways to crack the cryptocontainer, even the FBI had no chance of gaining access to it in encrypted form.

Ross sat down at his desk in the library, decrypted access to the information, including the passwords to the Silk Road control.

Next, according to the media, it’s just like in the movies, a man and a woman next to him start a fight. This caused Ross Ulbricht to turn to them and take his eyes off the laptop. At that moment, the Asian woman sitting next to him grabbed his laptop with the decrypted data and ran away.

Ross Ulbricht was arrested, and thanks to the data from the laptop, the prosecutor proved his guilt in court. The Silk Road creator was sentenced to life in prison.

What could have saved Ross?

Only the option to automatically lock cryptocontainers and password files after 15 seconds of inactivity.

In this case, by the time the agents gained access to the laptop, all the data would have been encrypted.