Quote:Europol on Tuesday announced the takedown of DarkMarket, which according to the law enforcement agency is “the world’s largest illegal marketplace on the dark web.”
DarkMarket served as a marketplace for cybercriminals to buy and sell drugs, counterfeit money, stolen or counterfeit credit card data, anonymous SIM cards and malware. According to Europol, DarkMarket had almost 500,000 users and more than 2,400 sellers at the time of closure.
“The investigation, which was led by the cybercrime unit of the Koblenz Public Prosecutor’s Office, allowed officers to locate and close the marketplace, switch off the servers and seize the criminal infrastructure – more than 20 servers in Moldova and Ukraine supported by the German Federal Criminal Police office (BKA),” said Europol in its Tuesday announcement of the dismantling.
In addition to shuttering DarkMarket’s infrastructure, The Central Criminal Investigation Department in Oldenburg (a German city) over the weekend arrested an Australian citizen near the German-Danish border. Europol said this citizen is the alleged operator of DarkMarket, but did not give further details.
In the future, “it is unclear to what extent the shutdown of this dark market will impact cybercriminal operations, beyond the near-term disruption to its current users,” Paul Prudhomme, cyber threat intelligence advisor at IntSights, told Threatpost.
He noted, new dark web marketplaces eventually emerge to replace those that have closed, and users simply migrate to those new websites and to existing competitors.
“The arrest of one of the website’s operators and the seizure of its infrastructure may nonetheless yield useful investigative leads for law enforcement with which to act against its individual users, which may have more enduring impact,” Prudhomme said. “The website’s use of infrastructure in Ukraine and Moldova is not surprising, as many criminals prefer to host infrastructure in those two countries that they perceive to be relatively safe from law enforcement.”
Read more: https://threatpost.com/europol-dismantli...ce/162949/
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