“These findings suggest that lifestyle practices that reduce bacterial dispersal — specifically, sanitation and drinking water treatment — might be an important cause of microbiome alterations,” the University of Alberta’s Jens Walter, senior author of the Papua New Guinea study, said in a news release.
Sanitation practices are generally a good thing, but scientists say beneficial bacteria are lost along the way. For example, the team behind the research in Venezuela found that the Yanomami tribespeople harbored bacteria that may play a role in boosting immune response and metabolizing carbohydrates. Another example is Oxalobacter formigenes, a microbe that’s linked to a decreased risk of kidney stones.
“The challenge is to determine which are the important bacteria whose function we need to be healthy, and have a healthy, educated immune system and a healthy metabolic system,” said Maria Dominguez-Bello, a medical researcher at New York University’s Langone Medical Center who is the senior author of the study.
But TheRealDeal does offer countermeasures against potential fraud. Like the Silk Road and its ilk, it asks that all bitcoin transactions through the site be kept in escrow, so the payment can be returned to the buyer if the seller doesn’t deliver. And unlike most Dark Web markets, it allows only so-called multisignature transactions. That means the bitcoins are held at an address jointly controlled by the buyer, the seller, and the market’s admins. For the money to be moved to the seller’s account, two out of three of those parties must sign off on the deal, giving the administrators the tie-breaking vote to resolve disputes. (Despite that system, it’s still not clear exactly how those disputes would be resolved. In many cases, TheRealDeal admins would likely have to test exploits themselves to know if a buyer had been scammed.)
TheRealDeal goes further than many past markets in attempting to assuage its users’ fears that the market itself might attempt to steal their bitcoins. Though it collects a fee on every transaction (3 percent or .1 bitcoin, depending on the size of the sale) it never asks the user to store their bitcoins in a wallet controlled by the market itself. Therefore, it can’t pull the sort of “exit scam” other markets like Sheep Marketplace and more recently Evolution have, abruptly shutting down and absconding with millions of dollars worth of users’ coins. “We don’t have a wallet, we don’t want your coins and want to assure you that we will not run away with your coins one day,” the site’s FAQ reads.
Just who’s running TheRealDeal is, as with most Dark Web markets, a mystery. An administrator didn’t immediately respond to WIRED’s requests for an interview, and the site’s creators describe themselves only as experts in information security with a background in zero-day sales. “We consist of 4 partners who have a lot of experience in infosec,” they wrote in an anonymous Q&A with the Dark Web blog DeepDotWeb.
We have a lot of experience dealing in the [unencrypted, traditional internet] when it comes to 0day exploit code, databases and so on .. But the problem is that 90% of these dealers are scammers. People with a lot of experience can always do their best to determine if what they are buying is real based on technical information and demos but some of these ‘vendors’ are very clever and very sneaky. We decided it would be much better if there was a place where people can trade such pieces of information and code combined with a system that will prevent fraud and also provide high anonymity.
TheRealDeal’s creators aren’t the first to try bringing this gray market economy online. A website called WabiSabiLabi launched in 2007 with the aim of becoming an eBay for exploits. But the business soon surrendered that notion, due in part to sellers’ inability to prove the validity of their exploits without fully revealing them. Despite all its multisignature protections and escrow system, TheRealDeal could face a similar problem.
Unlike other players in the zero-day industry, however, TheRealDeal doesn’t face the added hurdle of trying to keep its sales legal or ethical. Companies like the French hacking firm Vupen, by contrast, argue that it sells zero-day vulnerabilities only to NATO governments or allies. Zero-day sales have become a lucrative underground trade in recent years, with government intelligence and law enforcement agencies often the highest bidders. Those buyers might be turned off by TheRealDeal’s approach of using Tor and bitcoin to obscure sellers’ identities. But that anonymity instead enables a “no-questions-asked” system that could draw a customer base of cybercriminals or authoritarian regime hackers.
If there were any remaining question about TheRealDeal’s legality, the site also sells a variety of money laundering services, stolen accounts, and drugs. Its zero-day sales are only the featured items in an anything-goes smorgasbord that includes everything from stolen identities to LSD and amphetamines.
In fact, TheRealDeal represents the Dark-Web economy’s continued progression towards a true, lawless free market. The Silk Road, though it tolerated some simple and easily obtained hacking tools, generally enforced a policy of only “victimless” crime.
TheRealDeal has no such restrictions. Its rules ban only child pornography and, strangely, services that offer “doxing,” the posting of specific users’ private information. But victims, if its anonymous form of zero-day sales catches on, will be just another part of the business model.
‘Alarming’ antibiotic resistance
Dominguez-Bello and her colleagues also found that the Yanomami tribespeople, who were “uncontacted” by Western visitors until 2009, nevertheless had gut bacteria with genes that could activate resistance to antibiotics. Some of the resistance genes could counter even the third- and fourth-generation synthetic antibiotics created to fight modern diseases.
The researchers say their findings imply that bacteria may possess an ancient but complex set of defense mechanisms that swing into action whenever they come across new threats.
Co-author Gautam Dantas, an immunologist at Washington University School of Medicine, told reporters that the finding was “alarming to us.”
“It emphasizes the need to ramp up our research for new antibiotics, because otherwise we’re going to lose this battle against infectious diseases,” Dantas told reporters.
The gut bacteria were extracted from fecal samples as well as skin swabs and mouth swabs, and then subjected to genetic analysis. The fact that the microbial communities were more diverse is in line with previous studies that have focused on Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania and the Matses people of the Peruvian Amazon.
What’s good for the gut
The microbiome has become a topic of increasing interest in recent years, because scientists suspect it plays a crucial role in human health. The best-known illustration of the microbiome’s importance is the use of “fecal transplants” to cure a life-threatening intestinal infection known as C. difficile. In the future, microbiome therapy could address autism, obesity, food allergies and immune deficiencies.
Some of the bacteria identified in the guts of the Yanomami “might have therapeutic value” for such conditions, said Jose Clemente from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, another co-author of the study.
Dominguez-Bello emphasized that microbiome studies could help the Yanomami as well as more industrialized societies.
“It seems inevitable that the world is converging to westernized lifestyles,” she told reporters, “and so far it has been inevitable to observe how Amerindians when they integrate, or Africans when they westernize — how they quickly suffer our current diseases, obesity, diabetes. So I think that by learning what went wrong with our lifestyle … we’ll also benefit them in not suffering the same health consequences.”
In addition to Dominguez-Bello, Dantes and Clemente, the authors of the Science Advances study, “The Microbiome of Uncontacted Amerindians,” include Erica Pehrsson, Martin Blaser, Kuldip Sandhu, Zhan Gao, Bin Wang, Magda Magris, Glida Hidalgo, Monica Contreras, Óscar Noya-Alarcón, Orlana Lander, Jeremy McDonald, Mike Cox, Jens Walter, Phaik Lyn Oh, Jean Ruiz, Selena Rodriguez, Nan Shen, Se Jin Song, Jessica Metcalf and Rob Knight.
In addition to Walter, the authors of the Cell Reports study, “The Gut Microbiota of Rural Papua New Guineans: Composition, Diversity Patterns and Ecological Processes,” include Inés Martínez, James Stegen, Maria Maldonado-Gómez, A. Murat Eren, Peter Siba and Andrew R. Greenhill.
New Dark-Web Market Is Selling Zero-Day Exploits to Hackers | WIRED.