NEW YORK, darknet marketdarknet markets url onion address Jan 26 (Reuters) – Cybercriminals laundered $8.6 billion in cryptocurrencies last year, up 30% from 2020, according to a report from blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis released on Wednesday.
Overall, cybercriminals have laundered more than $33 billion worth of crypto since 2017, Chainalysis estimated, dark markets 2024 web marketplaces with most of the total over time moving to centralized exchanges.
The firm said the sharp rise in money laundering activity in 2021 was not surprising, given the significant growth of both legitimate and illegal crypto activity last year.
Money laundering refers to that process of disguising the origin of illegally obtained money by transferring it to legitimate businesses.
About 17% of the $8.6 billion laundered went to decentralized finance applications, Chainalysis said, referring to the sector which facilitates crypto-denominated financial transactions outside of traditional banks.
That was up from 2% in 2020.
Mining pools, high-risk exchanges, and mixers also saw substantial increases in value received from illicit addresses, the report said.
Mixers typically combine potentially identifiable or tainted cryptocurrency funds with others, so as to conceal the trail to the fund’s original source.
Wallet addresses associated with theft sent just under half of their stolen funds, or dark web market list more than $750 million worth of crypto in total, to decentralized finance platforms, according to the Chainalysis report.
Chainalysis also clarified that the $8.6 billion laundered last year represents funds derived from crypto-native crime such as darknet markets onion addressdarknet market sales or ransomware attacks in which profits are in crypto instead of fiat currencies.
“It’s more difficult to measure how much fiat currency derived from off-line crime – traditional drug trafficking, for example – is converted into cryptocurrency to be laundered,” Chainalysis said in the report.
“However, we know anecdotally this is happening.” (Reporting by Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss; Editing by Himani Sarkar)
Police around the world have arrested 150 suspects in one of the largest-ever dark web sting operations.
The suspects arrested included several high-profile targets, involved in buying or selling illegal goods online, Europol said today.
Operation Dark HunTOR also recovered millions of pounds in cash and , as well as drugs and guns.
The bust stems from a German-led police sting earlier this year taking down the ‘world’s largest’ darknet market marketplace.
Darknet markets are e-commerce sites designed to lie beyond the reach of regular search engines and are popular with criminals, as buyers and sellers are largely untraceable.
Police around the world have arrested 150 suspects in one of the largest-ever dark web sting operations.
The suspects arrested included several high-profile targets, involved in buying or dark web market urls selling illegal goods online, Europol said today (stock image)
Dark HunTOR, ‘was composed of a series of separate but complementary actions in Australia, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, dark darknet market list the United Kingdom, and the United States,’ the Hague-based Europol said.
In the United States alone, police arrested 65 people, while 47 were held in Germany, 24 in Britain, and four each in Italy and the Netherlands, among others.
A number of those arrested ‘were considered high-value targets’ by Europol.
Law agents also confiscated 26.7 million euros (£22.45million) in cash and virtual currencies, as well as 45 guns and 516lbs of drugs, including 25,000 ecstasy pills.
Italian police also shut down the ‘DeepSea’ and ‘Berlusconi’ marketplaces, ‘which together boasted over 100,000 announcements of illegal products’, said Europol, which coordinated the operation together with its twin judicial agency Eurojust.
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German police in January closed down the ‘DarkMarket’ online marketplace, used by its alleged operator, an Australian, to facilitate the sale of drugs, stolen credit card data and malware.
Europol said the arrest of the alleged operator, caught near the German-Danish border at the time, and the seizure of the criminal infrastructure provided ‘investigators across the world with a trove of evidence’.
German prosecutors at the time said DarkMarket came to light in the course of a major investigation against the web-hosting service Cyberbunker, located in a former NATO bunker in southwest Germany.
Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre EC3 has since been compiling intelligence packages to identify the key targets, the continent’s policing agency said.
The secret ‘darknet market‘ includes websites that can be assessed only with specific software or authorisations, ensuring anonymity for users.
Dark HunTOR, ‘was composed of a series of separate but complementary actions in Australia, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States,’ the Hague-based Europol (their HQ pictured) said
They have faced increased pressure from international law enforcement in recent months.
‘The point of operations such as this is to put criminals operating on the dark web on notice (that) the law enforcement community has the means and global partnerships to unmask them and hold them accountable for their illegal activities,’ Europol deputy director of operations Jean-Philippe Lecouffe said.
Rolf van Wegberg, cybercrime investigator at the TU Delft university said the operation signalled a break in the trend of recent police actions against suspected online criminals.
‘This kind of operations in the past looked at arresting the controllers of these marketplaces, we now see police services targeting the top sellers,’ he told investigative journalists at the Dutch KRO-NCRV public broadcaster.
A press conference about the operation has been set for 10am local time (2pm GMT) in Washington with the Department of Justice.
WASHINGTON, Feb 8 (Reuters) – The FBI arrested a husband and wife on Tuesday morning, darknet site alleging they conspired to launder cryptocurrency stolen from the 2016 hack of virtual currency exchange Bitfinex, and said law enforcement has already seized over $3.6 billion in cryptocurrency tied to the hack.
The action represents the Justice Department’s largest-ever financial seizure, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said, adding in a statement that it shows cryptocurrency is “not a safe haven for criminals.”
Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife Heather Morgan, 31, both of Manhattan, are scheduled to make their initial appearances in federal court Tuesday at 3:00 p.m.
in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The case was filed in a federal court in Washington, D.C.
The pair is accused of conspiring to launder 119,754 bitcoin that was stolen, after a hacker attacked Bitfinex and initiated more than 2,0000 unauthorized transactions.
Justice Department officials said the transactions at the time were valued at $71 million in Bitcoin, but with the rise in the currency’s value, darkmarket url it is now valued at over $4.5 billion.
“As the complaint alleges, the FBI and federal prosecutors were able to trace the movement of Bitcoin from this hack,” said Matthew Graves, the U.S.
Attorney for the District of Columbia.
He added that the money moved through a major darknet market exchange tied to a host of crimes, darknet marketdark web market list as well as cryptocurrency addresses tied to child sexual abuse materials.
Tuesday’s criminal complaint came more than four months after Monaco announced the department was launching website a new National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, which is comprised of a mix of anti-money laundering and cybersecurity experts.
Cyber criminals who attack companies, municipalities and individuals with ransomware often demand darknet market sites payment in the form of cryptocurrency.
In one high-profile example last year, former partners and associates of the ransomware group REvil website caused a widespread gas shortage on the U.S.
East Coast when it used encryption software called DarkSide to launch a cyber attack on the Colonial Pipeline.
The Justice Department was later recovered website some $2.3 million in cryptocurrency ransom that Colonial paid to the hackers.
(Reporting by Sarah N.
Lynch and dark market onion Raphael Satter; Editing by Richard Chang)
A New York couple dubbed ‘ Bonnie and Crypto Clyde’ arrested on charges of laundering $4.5 billion in stolen Bitcoin led an existence ‘pulled from the pages of a spy novel,’ prosecutors have said.
Ilya ” Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife Heather Morgan, 31, are being held in custody following their Tuesday arrest, and will appear before a court in Washington on Monday.
Federal law enforcement officials said they have recovered roughly $3.6 billon in cryptocurrency – the Justice Department’s largest ever financial seizure – linked to the hack of Bitfinex, a virtual currency exchange based in , whose systems were breached nearly six years ago.
Morgan had a remarkable online presence as an influencer and self-described ‘cringe’ rapper named Razzlekhan, who makes music ‘for the entrepreneurs and hackers, all the misfits and smart slackers’.
Prosecutors detailed on Thursday in court documents a remarkable lifestyle, complete with hollowed-out books, fake passports and burner phones.
Photos showed the books, and ziplock bags stuffed with cash.
Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife Heather Morgan were arrested on Tuesday and charged with money laundering
Bail for Ilya ‘Dutch’ Lichtenstein, 34, right, and his wife, Heather Rhiannon Morgan, 31, was set at $5million and $3million respectively after their arrest on Tuesday but they have not been released
A bag labeled ‘burner phones’ is shown in court documents. Prosecutors allege the couple had dozens of devices
Some of the phones found at Morgan and Lichenstein’s Wall Street apartment
A lawyer for dark websites the self-proclaimed ‘Crocodile of Wall Street’ rapper, Heather Morgan, 31, and her husband Ilya ‘ Dutch ‘ Lichtenstein, dark markets 34, right, has urged a judge to allow them to be freed on bail
In this courtroom sketch, attorney Sam Enzer, center, sits between Heather Morgan, left, and her husband, Ilya ‘Dutch’ Lichtenstein, in federal court, on Tuesday
As federal investigators raided their Wall Street home last month, Morgan asked to be allowed to retrieve her cat from under the bed.
But as she was crouching down and pretending to get the pet, agents saw that she was frantically trying to lock her phone, prompting them to wrestle her to the ground, prosecutors say.
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The January 5 raid saw the officers find $40,000 in cash, dozens of electronic devices, dark market urldarknet market 2024 and two hollowed-out books.
The delivery address was given as the 11 Mirrors Design Hotel in Kiev, which is the same hotel that Morgan posted photos of on her social media platforms, and darknet market lists from where Uber receipts showed she traveled.
Another document contained within Lichtenstein’s cloud storage account, prosecutors say, includes a Russian-language document that describes ‘how to anonymously receive a parcel in Ukraine.’
The document provides details of video camera positioning in Ukrainian post offices and how to avoid being seen.
Morgan was arrested on Tuesday in Manhattan, together with her husband, on federal charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to defraud the United States
Morgan, 31, who calls herself the ‘Crocodile of Wall Street’ (hence the croc pictured in her hand) also spends time creating low-budget rap videos and posing for quirky photoshoots
In court on Friday, the couple’s lawyer, Samson Enzer, darknet markets links urged a judge to allow them to be freed on $3 million and $4.5 million bail respectively, saying the fact neither of them fled when given the chance upon first being alerted to the investigation, proves they would not run from the law if now freed on bail.
Prosecutors are urging caution: It is believed the couple still have vast sums of money at their disposal which is likely hidden from authorities.
Furthermore, Lichtenstein has dual citizenship with Russia giving the couple a possible safe haven from which it would be particularly difficult for U.S. authorities to secure an extradition order should the couple choose to flee.
If convicted, they face up to a maximum of 25 years in prison.
This is part of our about how innovators are thinking up new ways to make you — and the world around you — smarter.
“Are you a hacker?”
A Las Vegas driver asks me this after I tell him I’m headed to Defcon at Caesars Palace. I wonder if his sweat isn’t just from the 110℉ heat blasting the city.
All week, a cloud of paranoia looms over Las Vegas, as hackers from around the world swarm Sin City for Black Hat and Defcon, two back-to-back cybersecurity conferences taking place in the last week of July. At Caesars Palace, where Defcon is celebrating its 25th anniversary, the UPS store posts a sign telling guests it won’t accept printing requests from USB thumb drives. You can’t be too careful with all those hackers in town.
Everywhere I walk I see hackers — in tin-foiled fedoras, wearing . Mike Spicer, a security researcher, carries a 4-foot-high backpack holding a “Wi-Fi cactus.” Think wires, antennas, colored lights and 25 Wi-Fi scanners that, in seven hours, captured 75 gigabytes of data from anyone foolish enough to use public Wi-Fi. I see a woman thank him for holding the door open for her, dark market 2024 all while his backpack sniffs for unencrypted passwords and personal information it can grab literally out of thin air.
You’d think that, with all the potential threats literally walking about town, Vegas’ director of technology and innovation, Mike Sherwood, would be stressed out. It’s his job to protect thousands of smart sensors around the city that could jam traffic, blast water through pipes or cause a blackout if anything goes haywire.
And yet he’s sitting right in front of me at Black Hat, smiling.
His entire three-person team, in fact, is at Black Hat so they can learn how to stave off future attacks. Machine learning is guarding Las Vegas’ network for them.
Broadly speaking, artificial intelligence refers to machines carrying out jobs that we would consider smart. Machine learning is a subset of AI in which computers learn and adapt for themselves.
Now a number of cybersecurity companies are turning to machine learning in an attempt to stay one step ahead of professionals working to steal industrial secrets, disrupt national infrastructures, hold computer networks for ransom and even influence elections. Las Vegas, which relies on machine learning to keep the bad guys out, offers a glimpse into a future when more of us will turn to our AI overlords for protection.
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Man and machine
At its most basic, machine learning for security involves feeding massive amounts of data to the AI program, which the software then analyzes to spot patterns and recognize what is, and isn’t, a threat. If you do this millions of times, the machine becomes smart enough to prevent intrusions and malware on its own.
Theoretically.
Machine learning naysayers argue that hackers can write malware to trick AI. Sure the software can learn really fast, but it stumbles when it encounters data its creators didn’t anticipate. Remember how trolls turned ? It makes a good case against relying on AI for cybersecurity, where the stakes are so high.
Even so, that has protected Las Vegas’ network and dark web darknet market urls thousands of sensors for the last 18 months.
Since last February, Darktrace has defended the city from cyberattacks, around the clock. That comes in handy when you have only three staffers handling cybersecurity for people, 3,000 employees and thousands of online devices. It was worse when Sherwood joined two years ago.
“That was the time where we only had one security person on the team,” Sherwood tells me. “That was when I thought, ‘I need help and I can’t afford to hire more people.'”
He’d already used Darktrace in his previous job as deputy director of public safety and city technology in Irvine, California, and he thought the software could help in Las Vegas. Within two weeks, Darktrace found malware on Las Vegas’ network that was sending out data.
“We didn’t even know,” Sherwood says. “Traditional scanners weren’t picking it up.”
Pattern recognition
I’m standing in front of a tattoo parlor in , a little more than 4 miles from Caesars Palace. Across the street, I see three shuttered stores next to two bail bonds shops.
I’m convinced the taxi driver dropped me off at the wrong location.
This is supposed to be Vegas’ $1 million Innovation District project? Where are the in the area? Or the ?
I look again at the Innovation District map on my phone. I’m in the right place. Despite the rundown stores, trailer homes and empty lots, this corner of downtown Vegas is much smarter than it looks.
That’s because hidden on the roads and inside all the streetlights, traffic signals and pipes are thousands of sensors. They’re tracking the air quality, controlling the lights and water, counting the cars traveling along the roads, and providing Wi-Fi.
Officials chose the city’s rundown area to serve as its Innovation District because they wanted to redevelop it, with help from technology, Sherwood says. There’s just one problem: All those connected devices are potential targets for a cyberattack. That’s where Darktrace comes in.
Sherwood willingly banks on Darktrace to protect the city’s entire network because the software comes at machine learning from a different angle. Most machine learning tools rely on brute force: cramming themselves with thousands of terabytes of data so they can learn through plenty of trial and error. That’s how IBM’s Deep Blue computer learned to defeat Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, in a best-of-seven match in 1997. In the security world, that data describes malware signatures — essentially algorithms that identify specific viruses or darknet market lists worms, for instance.
Darktrace, in contrast, doesn’t look at a massive database of malware that’s come before. Instead, it looks for darknet marketplace patterns of human behavior. It learns within a week what’s considered normal behavior for users and sets off alarms when things fall out of pattern, like when someone’s computer suddenly starts encrypting loads of files.
Rise of the machines?
Still, it’s probably too soon to hand over all security responsibilities to artificial intelligence, dark web markets says , a security professor and director of Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab Security and Privacy Institute. He predicts it’ll take at least 10 years before we can safely use AI to keep bad things out.
“It’s really easy for AI to miss things,” Brumley tells me over the phone. “It’s not a perfect solution, and you still need people to make important choices.”
Brumley’s team last year built an AI machine that won beating out other AI entries. A few days later, their contender took on some of the world’s best hackers at Defcon. They came in last.
Sure, machines can help humans fight the scale and speed of attacks, but it’ll take years before they can actually call the shots, says Brumley.
That’s because the model for AI right now is still data cramming, which — by today’s standards — is actually kind of dumb.
But it was still good enough to , making him the de facto poster child for man outsmarted by machine.
“I always remind people it was a rematch, because I won the first one,” he tells me, chuckling, while sitting in a room at Caesars Palace during Defcon. Today Kasparov, 54, is the which is why he’s been giving talks around the country on why humans need to work with AI in cybersecurity.
He tells me machines can now learn too fast for humans to keep up, no matter if it’s chess or cybersecurity. “The vigilance and the precision required to beat the machine — it’s virtually impossible to reach in human competition,” Kasparov says.
Nobody’s perfect
About two months before Defcon, I’m at Darktrace’s headquarters in New York, where company executives show me how the system works.
On a screen, I see connected computers and printers sending data to Darktrace’s network as it monitors for behavior that’s out of the ordinary.
“For example, Sue doesn’t usually access this much internal data,” Nancy Karches, Darktrace’s sales manager, tells me. “This is straying from Sue’s normal pattern.” So Darktrace shuts down an attack most likely waged by another machine.
“When you have machine-based attacks, the attacks are moving at a machine speed from one to the other,” says Darktrace CEO Nicole Eagan. “It’s hard for humans to keep up with that.”
But what happens when AI becomes the norm? When everyone’s using AI, says Brumley, hackers will turn all their attention on finding the machines’ flaws — something they’re not doing yet.
“We’ve seen again and again, the reason new solutions work better is because attackers aren’t targeting its weaknesses,” he says. “As soon as it became popular, it started working worse and worse.”
About 60 percent of cybersecurity experts at Black Hat believe hackers will use AI for attacks by 2018, according to a survey from the security company Cylance.
“Machine learning security is not foolproof,” says Hyrum Anderson, principal data scientist at cybersecurity company Endgame, who and their tools. Anderson expects AI-based malware will rapidly make thousands of attempts to find code that the AI-based security misses.
“The bad guy can do this with trial and error, and it will cost him months,” Anderson says. “The bot can learn to do this, and it will take hours.”
Anderson says he expects cybercriminals will eventually sell AI malware on darknet markets onion markets to wannabe hackers.
For now, Sherwood feels safe having the city protected by an AI machine, which has shielded Las Vegas’ network for the past year. But he also realizes a day will come when hackers could outsmart the AI. That’s why Sherwood and his Las Vegas security team are at Black Hat: to learn how to use human judgment and creativity while the machine parries attacks as rapidly as they come in.
Kasparov has been trying to make that point for the last 20 years. He sees machines doing about 80 percent to 90 percent of the work, but he believes they’ll never get to what he calls “that last decimal place.”
“You will see more and more advanced destruction on one side, and that will force you to become more creative on the positive side,” he tells me.
“Human creativity is how we make the difference.”
: Reporters’ dispatches from the field on tech’s role in the global refugee crisis.
: CNET hunts for innovation outside the Silicon Valley bubble.
THE HAGUE, Oct 26 (Reuters) – At least 150 people have been arrested by European and U.S.
authorities after a joint crackdown on traders of drugs, weapons and other illicit goods on darknet market e-commerce sites, Dutch media reported Tuesday citing police agency Europol.
Cash and cryptocurrency worth 26.7 million euros ($31 million) and 234 kilograms of drugs were also seized, according to Dutch broadcaster KRO-NRCV.
“This operation proves that we can reach (criminals on the dark web) even if they think they are hiding somewhere, they cannot be sure we won’t be there at one moment to knock on their door”, Europol’s deputy executive director of operations, Jean-Philippe Lecouffe told the broadcaster.
Europol would not comment on the report, but referred to a press conference set for 10AM local time (1400 GMT) in Washington with the Department of Justice.
According to the Dutch media 65 U.S.
nationals were arrested, along with 47 Germans, 24 Brits and a handful of Dutch, French, Swiss and Bulgarian nationals.
The operation focused on sellers and buyers on the darknet market rather than the people running the sites as in earlier crackdowns.
darknet market markets are e-commerce sites designed to lie beyond the reach of regular search engines.
They are popular with criminals, as buyers and dark darknet market list sellers are largely untraceable.
In January this year, Europol announced it had taken down an online marketplace called “darkmarket url” that sold illegal drugs in an operation led by German law enforcement agencies.
($1 = 0.8593 euros)
(Reporting by Stephanie van den Berg, editing by Bart Meijer and dark web darknet market links Christina Fincher)
An alleged fraudster dubbed The Crocodile of Wall Street over claims she laundered $4.5 billion in has been freed on bail – but her husband has been ordered to stay in jail.
Heather Morgan was freed by a judge Monday, pending trial by a federal court.
But her husband Ilya Lichtenstein remains behind bars due to prosecutors’ fears that he could seek immunity in , darknet websites where he is also a citizen.
Judge Beryl Howell said on Monday that 31-year-old Morgan, referred as ‘Razzlekahn’ due to her rapping background, was no longer held in custody after the government deemed that she wasn’t as involved in the planning of the alleged crimes as her 34-year-ld husband, Ilya Lichtenstein, who was largely in control of the funds.
The judge also considered Morgan’s health issues as a factor, dark markets 2024 after she had recently had surgery to remove a lump in her breast.
With follow-up appointments expected, she will be closely monitored with an ankle bracelet GPS monitor while she is under house arrest.
Morgan has also been given restrictions on computer use, and a ban on carrying out cryptocurrency transactions.
The defense told the court that both defendants would guarantee to appear for all remaining court dates, and pointed out that both of their families, who were in court, were willing to bet their homes on it.
However, Howell finally ruled that there would be a significant ‘flight risk’ for Lichtenstein and agreed with federal prosecutors who insisted that just a portion of the millions in cryptocurrency that the couple stole could buy a new house or ‘buy each of their parents a private island.’
The judge also shared her concerns that Lichtenstein, who is a dual citizen of the United States and Russia, could seek refuge in a eastern European country, where he could possibly be granted immunity.
In this courtroom sketch, attorney Sam Enzer, center, sits between Heather Morgan, left, and her husband, Ilya ‘Dutch’ Lichtenstein, in federal court on February 8, dark market list 2022, in New York.
The couple are accused of conspiring to launder billions of dollars in cryptocurrency stolen from the 2016 hack of a virtual currency exchange
This illustration photo shows Heather Morgan, also known as ‘Razzlekhan,’ on a phone in front of the Bitcoin logo displayed on a screen. Along with Lichtenstein, Morgan has been arrested for the couple’s Bitcoin laundering scheme but has been freed after paying bail
Federal prosecutors also revealed that Lichtenstein had a file on his computer titled ‘passport ideas,’ which included several Darknet Market Lists vendors that sell passports, bank cards and other forms of identification.
The New York couple was arrested earlier in February after they conspired to launder cryptocurrency that was stolen during the 2016 hack of Bitfinex, dark web market a virtual currency exchange platform, and currently estimated at $4.5 billion.
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Both are accused of using several techniques to launder Bitcoin, including using fake identifies to create accounts; coding computer programs to execute fast, automated transactions; depositing stolen funds in several accounts across one crypto exchange to cover their previous transactions; converting Bitcoin to other forms of cryptocurrency; and creating U.S.-based business accounts to wire their funds and make them seem legitimate.
Over five years, a hacker allegedly laundered 119,754 bitcoin through 2,000 transactions on Bitfinex’s website before transferring the crypto funds into Lichtenstein’s digital wallet.
The couple could face up to 25 years years behind bars if found guilty.
Lichtenstein (back) has not been granted bail after prosecutors alerted the judge of his Russian citizenship, where he could seek immunity, if he were no longer held into custody
Morgan has been labelled as an ‘integral player’ in the cryptocurrency laundering scheme but prosecutors identified Lichtenstein as the ‘brain’ behind the scheme’s operations
Bitfinex is a cryptocurrency exchange registered in the British Virgin Islands.
In August 2016, hackers were able to breach its security firewall before stealing about 120,000 bitcoin from its customers.
The amount that was stolen was worth roughly $70 million at the time, when the price of bitcoin was around $600.
At the time, Bitfinex announced to its customers that they would lose 36 percent of their funds to compensate for the losses from the incident.
It also created special digital tokens that were able to keep track of customers’ losses.
Some of the tokens could exchanged for shares of iFinex, the company that operates Bitfinex, while other tokens could be redeemed if the stolen bitcoins were recovered in the future.
The US Department of Justice announced that it would create a special judicial process for victims of the hack to reclaim their losses.
The hackers have never been identified.
Morgan and darknet marketdarknet markets links Lichtenstein were arrested by federal prosecutors of laundering the bitcoin stolen from Bitfinex, but they are not being accused for actually stealing the bitcoin in the hack.
Authorities were able to recover $3.6B after seizing couple’s private keys to digital wallets after their arrest earlier this month.
The social media site, which markets itself as a bastion of free speech amid censorship of extremists on Twitter and Facebook, was intermittently available late Sunday. Clicking on links to the site sometimes would produce error messages, but that didn’t seem to stop some of the site’s 800,000 users from posting celebratory messages, praising the company for coming back online. Many of them hailed the move as for .
“Through the grace of God Gab is back online,” Gab CEO Andrew Torba . “We will never give in. Free speech and liberty will always win.”
Gab’s return marks the latest turn in the unfolding debate over free speech in the modern age. Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube have on bad behavior and darknet market lists hate speech on their services. That’s driven some of the people banned from those sites to sites like and Gab, a Twitter-like alternative social network founded in 2016.
Last week, Gab came under scrutiny when reports surfaced that Robert Bowers, who is charged with opening fire in , used the social network to voice . Eleven people died .
Two days later, on Oct. 29, domain provider GoDaddy . GoDaddy said it made the decision after receiving complaints and finding content on Gab that “promotes and encourages violence against people.” , Stripe, Joyent, Shopify and dark web marketplacesdarknet markets onion 2024 Medium also cut ties with Gab.
Gab isn’t the only social network that’s been used by extremists. Facebook, darknet market markets url Twitter and YouTube all have been used by terrorists and Neo-Nazis, as well. With varying degrees of success, those platforms have tried to crack down on hate speech. Gab, however, markets itself as a bastion of free speech that is more permissive than other sites, which is part of why it’s attracted extremists.
Gab also isn’t the first site to see its domain register or host pull their services because of its content. Last year, the neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer after being booted by GoDaddy and Google. Gab, for its part, is operating on the surface dark web marketplaces for Dark web markets now.
In a , Torba said Gab was able to come back online after , , and should be fully back online Monday. “This coordinate smear by the mainstream media did not work,” he said in the message. “This smear is only going to propel us into the stratosphere.”
: Everything you need to know about the free speech debate.
: darkmarket list Everything you need to know about why tech is under Washington’s microscope.
A government shutdown of dark web marketplaces AlphaBay and Hansa has merchants and consumers looking for a new home.
Authorities , the largest online marketplace for illegal goods, on July 4, and took down Hansa, the third largest, on Thursday. The sites, where people could buy drugs, guns and child pornography, darkmarket link had flourished since 2014, when a predecessor, Silk Road, was shut down.
Fueled by Tor browsers and cryptocurrencies that offer anonymity, AlphaBay, Hansa and other sites avoided much government detection, allowing in the wake of Silk Road’s demise. AlphaBay replaced as the biggest, growing to be 10 times larger.
When one dark market falls, buyers and sellers just move on to the next one.
The migration of buyers and sellers comes as authorities around the world crack down on digital marketplaces that cater to growing numbers of shadowy sales. at the time it was taken offline. By comparison, Silk Road had just 14,000 when the Federal Bureau of Investigation closed it four years ago.
Many of the sites . A recent study by the University of Manchester and think tank Rand Europe found 811 arms-related listings on . The researchers found nearly 60% of the weapons came from the US and most of the sales were headed to Europe. Worryingly, one gun bought on a cryptomarket was used in a .
FBI deputy director dark markets Andrew McCabe acknowledged shutting down such markets was like playing whack-a-mole. His agency would likely have to in the future, he said.
“Critics will say as we shutter one site, another will emerge,” McCabe said at a press conference. “But that is the nature of criminal work. It never goes away, you have to constantly keep at it, and you have to use every tool in your toolbox.”
One such tool: using a captured marketplace as a trap.
After the fall of AlphaBay, Dutch police said they saw traffic heading to Hansa spike eight-fold. That was something the cops were anticipating.
Dutch police had full control of Hansa on June 20, but waited a month before shutting it down hoping to catch the new users in marketplace chaos.
“We could identify and disrupt the regular criminal activity that was happening on Hansa market but also sweep up all of those new users that were displaced from AlphaBay and looking for a new trading platform for their criminal activities,” Rob Wainwright, the Europol director, said at the press conference.
Dutch police now have the usernames, passwords and IP addresses of thousands of Hansa users, and are tracking them down.
An underground in flux
The ploy has dark web market users on edge. Many are concerned about whether the next available platform will be compromised as well. That has them questioning Dream darknet market, a marketplace that’s been in business since 2013 and benefitted from the shutdown of rivals.
“After the closure of the AlphaBay market, many vendors expressed that they were moving their operations to Hansa and Dream darknet market,” Liv Rowley, an analyst at Flashpoint, said. “The shuttering of Hansa now leaves Dream the only remaining major option.”
Rowley noticed chatter on forums and subreddits pointing to Dream darknet market as the next AlphaBay, but people are wary after the Dutch police ploy.
Reddit users on several threads have expressed concerns the website has been compromised in a similar fashion. A user who speculated Hansa had been compromised in a thread posted returned on Thursday to warn that .
“This is a warning you will want to heed,” the user, who goes by , posted. “They are waiting to gather as many refugees from AB & Hansa as they can and then drop the hammer.”
Other marketplaces, like Tochka and Valhalla, could also rise in the vacuum AlphaBay and Hansa have left. Some smaller dark web markets are even appealing to those lost in AlphaBay’s shake-up.
Security company was offering vendors from AlphaBay a discount if they moved to their platform.
“The entire illegal underground is in flux right now,” Flashpoint’s Rowley said.
It’ll be quiet on the dark web until people can find a reliable marketplace again, but eventually they will, said Emily Wilson, the director of analysis at Terbium Labs.
She called the busts a “sizable hiccup” but not “an irreversible blow.”
It’s unclear who’ll emerge from the fallout. But the FBI estimates that more than 40,000 merchants are looking for a place to sell. And there are more than 200,000 customers looking for places to buy stuff they can’t get on Amazon.
With AlphaBay, the Amazon of illegal goods, now shut down, the market is fragmenting. If you want malware, there’s a market for that on the dark web. The same for guns and for drugs. So business will go on, albeit less conveniently.
“For now, there are plenty of smaller and more specialized markets for vendors and buyers to continue trading,” Wilson said.
First published July 21, 8 a.m. ET
Update, 5:04 p.m.: Adds background on scope of the markets, weapons sales.
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THE HAGUE, Oct 26 (Reuters) – At least 150 people have been arrested by European and U.S.
authorities after a joint crackdown on traders of drugs, weapons and other illicit goods on darknet market e-commerce sites, Dutch media reported Tuesday citing police agency Europol.
Cash and cryptocurrency worth 26.7 million euros ($31 million) and 234 kilograms of drugs were also seized, according to Dutch broadcaster KRO-NRCV.
“This operation proves that we can reach (criminals on the dark web) even if they think they are hiding somewhere, they cannot be sure we won’t be there at one moment to knock on their door”, Europol’s deputy executive director of operations, Jean-Philippe Lecouffe told the broadcaster.
Europol would not comment on the report, but referred to a press conference set for 10AM local time (1400 GMT) in Washington with the Department of Justice.
According to the Dutch media 65 U.S.
nationals were arrested, along with 47 Germans, darknet magazine 24 Brits and a handful of Dutch, onion dark website French, Swiss and Bulgarian nationals.
The operation focused on sellers and buyers on the darknet market rather than the people running the sites as in earlier crackdowns.
Darknet markets are e-commerce sites designed to lie beyond the reach of regular search engines.
They are popular with criminals, as buyers and dark markets sellers are largely untraceable.
In January this year, Europol announced it had taken down an online marketplace called “darkmarket url” that sold illegal drugs in an operation led by German law enforcement agencies.
($1 = 0.8593 euros)
(Reporting by Stephanie van den Berg, editing by Bart Meijer and Christina Fincher)