Black Ops Darknet Market – Mirror 4 Under the Microscope
Mirror 4 of Black Ops has become the busiest onion address for the market since early 2024. While the main domain went down during the March DDoS wave, this particular mirror stayed up, giving it the longest continuous uptime of any Black Ops gateway. For researchers tracking darknet bazaars, that kind of stability is worth a closer look.
Background and Brief History
Black Ops itself launched in late 2021 as a “hundred-day market,” a term vendors use for short-lived shops that plan to exit quickly. Instead of disappearing, the crew kept extending operations, adding new mirrors every time a server was seized or flooded. Mirror 4 first appeared in December 2022 after the previous entry point was hijacked by a phishing clone. The admins signed the new link with their historical PGP key and posted the signature on Dread—standard practice for proving continuity. Since then, Mirror 4 has served as both a fallback and, at times, the primary door into the market.
Features and Functionality
The codebase is a fork of the old Monopoly-market engine, but the Black Ops developers stripped out the heavy JavaScript and replaced the wallet system with a direct-to-cold-storage model. The result is a lightweight, almost retro interface that loads quickly even over Tor circuits with high latency.
- Coin support: Bitcoin (native SegWit) and Monero; no Ethereum tokens or privacy coins beyond XMR
- Escrow: 2-of-3 with optional “early finalization” for trusted vendors
- PGP-only messaging; no clearnet notifications or email fallbacks
- “Stealth mode” listing option that hides item thumbnails from non-logged-in users
- Bulk order interface for repeat customers—effectively a private RFQ system
Vendors can set their own refund policies, but the market caps maximum refunds at 50 % once a package is marked “shipped,” a compromise between buyer protection and seller cash-flow.
Security Model
Black Ops runs on a three-tier server stack: nginx reverse proxies (the mirrors), an application layer hidden behind a second set of onions, and a backend wallet server that is—according to the admin post—air-gapped and only connected once every 24 h to batch payouts. Mirror 4 itself never holds private keys; it simply forwards signed withdrawal requests to the backend. That separation kept user balances intact when Mirrors 1 and 3 were seized in November 2023.
Two-factor authentication is mandatory for vendors and optional for buyers. The market supports both TOTP (time-based codes) and FIDO2 hardware tokens, rare on smaller shops. Disputes are handled by a rotating crew of three arbitrators; their PGP keys are embedded in the market’s signed “about” page so either party can verify that messages actually come from staff.
User Experience
Loading Mirror 4 with stock Tor Browser (Safest mode) takes roughly six seconds on a three-hop circuit, faster than many news sites. The landing page shows a simple captcha—currently a text-based proof-of-work challenge that blocks most bot traffic without forcing users to enable JavaScript. Once inside, the layout is tabular: categories on the left, search bar on top, listings in the center. Advanced filters let you sort by ship-from country, escrow type, and vendor level. One nice touch is the “risk gauge” that color-codes listings based on the vendor’s dispute ratio over the last 90 days; it’s not foolproof, but it saves scrolling through feedback threads.
Reputation and Trust
Black Ops has had one public breach—an SQL dump that appeared on BreachForums in May 2023. The dump contained only username hashes and public PGP keys, no order details, suggesting the attackers never reached the deeper backend. Since then, Mirror 4’s signed canary message has been updated every 14 days without fail. Vendors I track across markets report withdrawal times between 15 minutes and 4 hours, well within the promised 12-hour window. That consistency has pushed the market’s uptime score on darknet reputation boards to 93 %, higher than both Nemesis and Incognito during the same period.
Current Status
As of June 2024, Mirror 4 processes roughly 1,200 orders per day, down from a January peak of 1,900 but still enough to keep the escrow wallet cycling. The drop correlates with a broader post-Easter slump that affects most retail-facing markets. Phishing clones are active—there are at least five fake “Black Ops Mirror 4” onions circulating on paste sites—so the staff now publishes a fresh PGP-signed list of valid gateways every Monday. Uptime over the last 90 days sits at 97.3 %, with the briefest outage lasting 42 minutes during a scheduled kernel update.
Practical OPSEC Notes for Observers
If you’re studying the market rather than shopping, isolate the site in a Whonix workstation or Tails session and disable networking on the host. Mirror 4 forces HTTPS on the onion service, so verify the certificate fingerprint (SHA-256) that the admins post alongside their PGP signature; any mismatch is a guaranteed clone. Finally, never fetch the mirror list from clearnet paste bins—use the market’s own subdread or the PGP-signed message on Kilos. Those simple steps keep your research session separate from everyday browsing and reduce the risk of leaking a circuit.
Conclusion
Mirror 4 of Black Ops is not the flashiest darknet bazaar, but its reliability and stripped-down security model make it an interesting case study. Longevity in this space usually comes from competent infrastructure hygiene rather than bells and whistles, and that seems to hold here. The market’s insistence on PGP, its segregated wallet design, and the consistent canary updates give users concrete reasons to trust the code, even if the operators remain pseudonymous. On the flip side, the relatively small vendor pool and the lack of advanced privacy coins limit its appeal to niche buyers. For researchers, the takeaway is straightforward: when a mirror survives multiple DDoS waves and seizure attempts while keeping dispute rates low, it’s worth logging, not for what it sells, but for how it keeps selling.