dark0de, also known as Darkode, is a cybercrime forum and black marketplace described by Europol as "the most prolific English-speaking cybercriminal forum to date". [1] [2] The site, which was launched in 2007, serves as a venue for the sale and trade of hacking services, botnets, malware, stolen personally identifiable information, credit card information, hacked server credentials, and other illicit goods and services. [2] [3] [4]
In early 2013, it came under a large DDoS attack moving from bulletproof hosting provider Santrex to off-shore, the latter being a participant of the Stophaus campaign against Spamhaus. [5] The site has had an ongoing feud with security researcher Brian Krebs. [6]
In April 2014, various site users were attacked via the Heartbleed exploit, gaining access to private areas of the site. [7]
The forum was the target of Operation Shrouded Horizon, an international law enforcement effort led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation which culminated in the site's seizure and arrests of several of its members in July 2015. [8] [9] According to the FBI, the case is "believed to be the largest-ever coordinated law enforcement effort directed at an online cyber criminal forum". [10] Upon announcing the 12 charges issued by the United States, Attorney David Hickton called the site "a cyber hornet's nest of criminal hackers", "the most sophisticated English-speaking forum for criminal computer hackers in the world" which "represented one of the gravest threats to the integrity of data on computers in the United States". [11] [12]
On Monday, September 21, 2015, Daniel Placek appeared on the podcast Radiolab discussing his role in starting Darkode and his eventual cooperation with the United States government in its efforts to take down the site. [13]
Only two weeks after the announcement of the raid, the site reappeared with increased security, employing blockchain-based authentication and operating on the Tor anonymity network. [2] [3] [4] Researchers from MalwareTech suggested the relaunch was not genuine, and almost immediately after, it was hacked and its database leaked. [14]
On December 13, a version of the site returned on the original domain name. [15]
Cybercrime is a type of crime involving a computer or a computer network. The computer may have been used in committing the crime, or it may be the target. Cybercrime may harm someone's security or finances.
Bulletproof hosting (BPH) is technical infrastructure service provided by an Internet hosting service that is resilient to complaints of illicit activities, which serves criminal actors as a basic building block for streamlining various cyberattacks. BPH providers allow online gambling, illegal pornography, botnet command and control servers, spam, copyrighted materials, hate speech and misinformation, despite takedown court orders and law enforcement subpoenas, allowing such material in their acceptable use policies.
Brian Krebs is an American journalist and investigative reporter. He is best known for his coverage of profit-seeking cybercriminals. Krebs is the author of a daily blog, KrebsOnSecurity.com, covering computer security and cybercrime. From 1995 to 2009, Krebs was a reporter for The Washington Post and covered tech policy, privacy and computer security as well as authoring the Security Fix blog.
Shadowserver Foundation is a nonprofit security organization that gathers and analyzes data on malicious Internet activity, sends daily network reports to subscribers, and works with law enforcement organizations around the world in cybercrime investigations. Established in 2004 as a "volunteer watchdog group," it liaises with national governments, CSIRTs, network providers, academic institutions, financial institutions, Fortune 500 companies, and end users to improve Internet security, enhance product capability, advance research, and dismantle criminal infrastructure.
DarkMarket was an English-speaking internet cybercrime forum created by Renukanth Subramaniam in London that was shut down in 2008 after FBI agent J. Keith Mularski infiltrated it using the alias Master Splyntr, leading to more than 60 arrests worldwide. Subramaniam, who used the alias JiLsi, admitted conspiracy to defraud and was sentenced to nearly five years in prison in February 2010.
There is no commonly agreed single definition of “cybercrime”. It refers to illegal internet-mediated activities that often take place in global electronic networks. Cybercrime is "international" or "transnational" – there are ‘no cyber-borders between countries'. International cybercrimes often challenge the effectiveness of domestic and international law, and law enforcement. Because existing laws in many countries are not tailored to deal with cybercrime, criminals increasingly conduct crimes on the Internet in order to take advantages of the less severe punishments or difficulties of being traced. No matter, in developing or developed countries, governments and industries have gradually realized the colossal threats of cybercrime on economic and political security and public interests. However, complexity in types and forms of cybercrime increases the difficulty to fight back. In this sense, fighting cybercrime calls for international cooperation. Various organizations and governments have already made joint efforts in establishing global standards of legislation and law enforcement both on a regional and on an international scale. China–United States cooperation is one of the most striking progress recently, because they are the top two source countries of cybercrime.
The European Cybercrime Centre is the body of the Police Office (Europol) of the European Union (EU), headquartered in The Hague, that coordinates cross-border law enforcement activities against computer crime and acts as a centre of technical expertise on the matter.
The dark web is the World Wide Web content that exists on darknets: overlay networks that use the Internet but require specific software, configurations, or authorization to access. Through the dark web, private computer networks can communicate and conduct business anonymously without divulging identifying information, such as a user's location. The dark web forms a small part of the deep web, the part of the web not indexed by web search engines, although sometimes the term deep web is mistakenly used to refer specifically to the dark web.
Operation Tovar is an international collaborative operation carried out by law enforcement agencies from multiple countries against the Gameover ZeuS botnet, which is believed by the investigators to have been used in bank fraud and the distribution of the CryptoLocker ransomware.
GameOver ZeuS (GOZ), also known as peer-to-peer (P2P) ZeuS, ZeuS3, and GoZeus, is a Trojan horse developed by Russian cybercriminal Evgeniy Bogachev. Created in 2011 as a successor to Jabber Zeus, another project of Bogachev's, the malware is notorious for its usage in bank fraud resulting in damages of approximately $100 million and being the main vehicle through which the CryptoLocker ransomware attack was conducted, resulting in millions of dollars of losses. At the peak of its activity in 2012 and 2013, between 500,000 and 1 million computers were infected with GameOver ZeuS.
Roman Valerevich Seleznev, also known by his hacker name Track2, is a Russian computer hacker. Seleznev was indicted in the United States in 2011, and was convicted of hacking into servers to steal credit-card data. His activities are estimated to have caused more than $169 million in damages to businesses and financial institutions. Seleznev was arrested on July 5, 2014, and was sentenced to 27 years in prison for wire fraud, intentional damage to a protected computer, and identity theft.
TheRealDeal was a darknet website and a part of the cyber-arms industry reported to be selling code and zero-day software exploits.
Operation Shrouded Horizon was an 18-month international law enforcement investigation culminating in the July 2015 seizure of Darkode, an online cybercrime forum and black market, and the arrest of several of its members. The case involved law enforcement agencies from 20 countries, led by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with the assistance of Europol, in what the FBI called "the largest-ever coordinated law enforcement effort directed at an online cyber criminal forum".
Carding is a term describing the trafficking and unauthorized use of credit cards. The stolen credit cards or credit card numbers are then used to buy prepaid gift cards to cover up the tracks. Activities also encompass exploitation of personal data, and money laundering techniques. Modern carding sites have been described as full-service commercial entities.
A crime forum is a generic term for an Internet forum specialising in computer crime and Internet fraud activities such as hacking, identity theft, phishing, pharming, malware or spamming.
Marcus Hutchins, also known online as MalwareTech, is a British computer security researcher known for stopping the WannaCry ransomware attack. He is employed by cybersecurity firm Kryptos Logic. Hutchins is from Ilfracombe in Devon.
Hack Forums is an Internet forum dedicated to discussions related to hacker culture and computer security. The website ranks as the number one website in the "Hacking" category in terms of web-traffic by the analysis company Alexa Internet. The website has been widely reported as facilitating online criminal activity, such as the case of Zachary Shames, who was arrested for selling keylogging software on Hack Forums in 2013 which was used to steal personal information.
Ruslan Stoyanov is a Russian computer scientist. In December 2016, he was arrested on charges of treason as part of the Mikhailov case. In 2019, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
VPNLab was a VPN service that catered to cyber criminals. The service was shut down by following a seizure Europol in January 2022.
Jabber Zeus was a cybercriminal syndicate and associated Trojan horse created and run by hackers and money launderers based in Russia, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine. It was the second main iteration of the Zeus malware and racketeering enterprise, succeeding Zeus and preceding Gameover Zeus.
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