BERLIN (AP) – German prosecutors said Friday they have filed charges against four men over their alleged involvement with a major international platform for darkmarket url child pornography that was taken down last year.
Pedophiles used it to exchange and darknet market sites watch pornography of children and toddlers, darknet market lists most of them boys, from all over the world. It was shut down in April 2021.
The suspects are aged between 41 and 65, Frankfurt prosecutors said in a statement. Their names weren’t released, in keeping with German privacy rules.
They face charges that include spreading and producing child pornography and sexual abuse of children.
Two of the men are accused of building the platform in 2019. One of them also allegedly sexually abused two children. The other was extradited in October from Paraguay, Darknet Markets Onion Address where he had lived for a few years.
A third suspect is accused of acting as an administrator and tor drug darknet market moderator for the platform as well as sexually abusing two children. Prosecutors say that the fourth man was “one of the most active users” of the platform.
All four are in custody.
The Frankfurt state court now has to decide whether the case will go to trial and if so when. Prosecutors said investigations of other suspected members of the platform are continuing.
WASHINGTON, Oct 26 (Reuters) – An international operation targeting trafficking in opioids on a clandestine part of the internet called the darknet sites has led to about 150 arrests in the United States and dark market urldarknet market list Europe and the seizure of drugs, cash and guns, U.S.
and European authorities said on Tuesday.
The crackdown, darknet marketdarknet markets onion address onion address called Operation Dark HunTor, was announced at a U.S. Justice Department news conference where Deputy U.S Attorney General Lisa Monaco warned cyberspace drug sellers: “There is no dark internet. We can and we will shed a light.”
Jean-Philippe Lecouffe, deputy director of the international police agency Europol, hailed the results of Operation Dark HunTor as “spectacular.” He said the operation sends a message that “no one is beyond the reach of law enforcement, even on the dark web.” The darknet market and dark web are related terms concerning a part of the internet accessible only using a specialized web browser and the assortment of internet sites residing there.
An opioid epidemic has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the United States alone in the past two decades due to overdoses from prescription painkillers and dark market url illegal substances, constituting an enduring public health crisis.
The Dark HunTor operation produced arrests of 150 people accused of being drug traffickers and others accused of engaging in sales of illicit goods and services.
There were 65 arrests in the United States, 47 in Germany, 24 in the United Kingdom, four each in the Netherlands and Italy, three in France, two in Switzerland and one in Bulgaria, the Justice Department said.
The department added that the operation resulted in seizures of more than $31.6 million in cash and virtual currencies as well as 45 firearms.
It added that about 234 kilograms (515 pounds) of drugs including more than 200,000 ecstasy, fentanyl, oxycodone, hydrocodone and methamphetamine pills were seized, along with counterfeit medicines.
Kenneth Polite, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said such trafficking presents “a global threat and it requires a global response.”
The Justice Department said the crackdown built on operations conducted in late 2020 and early 2021 to disrupt dark web trafficking.
It said that in January, an international crackdown targeted DarkMarket, the world’s largest dark web international marketplace.
(Reporting by Mark Hosenball; Editing by Will Dunham)
COLLEGE PARK, Md. (AP) – A federal judge rejected a plea agreement on Wednesday that called for dark markets 15 to 21 years in prison for a man authorities described as the world´s largest purveyor of child pornography.
Eric Eoin Marques is entitled to withdraw his guilty plea from last year if the judge departs from the sentencing range prosecutors and defense attorneys recommended.
But U.S.
District Judge Theodore Chuang isn’t bound by the terms of the Justice Department´s plea deal.
“It’s too flawed, and I also don’t agree with the outcome,” Chuang said.
The judge said he’s inclined to give Marques a longer sentence for operating a web hosting service that enabled users to anonymously access millions of illicit images and videos, many depicting the rape and torture of infants and toddlers.
The judge criticized a provision of the plea deal that wouldn’t give Marques credit for six years he spent in custody in Ireland while fighting extradition after his 2013 arrest in Dublin. Chuang said he can’t tell the federal Bureau of Prisons to refrain from counting those years when Marques likely is entitled to get credit for that time.
The judge said he isn’t prepared to impose a sentence of 15 to 21 years if Marques does get credit for those six years.
“I want a sentence higher than that,” Chuang added.
“It’s not going to be 21 minus 6 to 15. That’s not going to happen. I don’t have to follow what you all did. It’s clear neither of you really understood what you were doing.”
Chuang also expressed frustration that prosecutors and defense lawyers still couldn’t agree on certain facts of the case even after spelling them out in writing as part of the deal.
“I certainly think the process was such that I shouldn’t defer to the parties’ agreement when I’m not sure they really thought it out that carefully,” he said.
Defense attorney Brendan Hurson told the judge that his remarks give them a “platform to negotiate further.”
“If we can’t get somewhere, then we would ask for some time to set a trial date,” Hurson said.
Chuang instructed the attorneys to provide him with a status report by June 25.
Marques, a 35-year-old dual citizen of the U.S.
and Ireland, was extradited to Maryland in March 2019, and pleaded guilty in February 2020 to conspiracy to advertise child pornography. He faced a mandatory minimum of 15 years and a maximum of 30 years in prison before the plea deal.
Marques created and operated a free, anonymous web hosting service, called “Freedom Hosting,” on the darknet market between 2008 and 2013.
The darknet market is part of the internet but hosted within an encrypted network. It is accessible only through anonymity-providing tools, such as the Tor browser, and allows users to access websites without revealing their IP addresses.
Marques´ attorneys have questioned how federal investigators were able to pierce the Tor network´s anonymity and trace the IP address of the server to a web hosting company in Roubaix, France.
“This anonymity is notoriously difficult for government investigators to penetrate,” they wrote.
Defense attorneys said they received an initial answer to that question when the government revealed “vague details” of how they discovered the IP address and location of the server.
“It appears that this disclosure was delayed, in part, because the investigative techniques employed were, until recently, classified,” they wrote in December 2019.
Investigators found what appeared to be more than 8.5 million images and videos of child pornography on the Freedom Hosting server, including nearly 2 million images that were new to authorities, according to a court filing that accompanied Marques’ guilty plea.
Marques was living in Ireland at the time of the offenses.
He used the encrypted server in France to host more than 200 websites that site administrators and users used to upload and download child pornography.
In 2013, FBI agents in Maryland connected to the network and dark web markets accessed a child pornography bulletin board with more than 7,700 members and more than 22,000 posts.
Agents downloaded more than 1 million files from another website on the network, nearly all of which depicted sexually explicit images of children.
In July 2013, Irish authorities searched Marques’ home and vehicle and detained him. When investigators entered his home, Marques moved toward his computer but was subdued before he could turn it off, authorities said.
After his release from custody, Marques purchased a new laptop and logged into his server to lock out the FBI and other law enforcement, the filing says.
Authorities seized nearly $155,000 in U.S.
currency from Marques. During an August 2013 extradition hearing, Marques said his business had been “very successful” and profitable.
In an April 28 court filing, darknet market sites a prosecutor said a government witness was prepared to testify at Wednesday’s sentencing hearing that law enforcement had identified Marques as the largest purveyor of child pornography in the world and that he made approximately $3.6 million in U.S.
currency from his servers.
___
This version corrects that the judge set a June 25 deadline for a status report from attorneys, not a status conference for that date.
BERLIN (AP) – German prosecutors said Friday they have filed charges against four men over their alleged involvement with a major international platform for child pornography that was taken down last year.
Investigators say the “BoysTown” platform, which operated on the darknet market, Dark market Link had more than 400,000 members.
The suspects are aged between 41 and 65, darknet market markets links Frankfurt prosecutors said in a statement. Their names weren’t released, in keeping with German privacy rules.
They face charges that include spreading and producing child pornography and darknet market markets onion address sexual abuse of children.
Two of the men are accused of building the platform in 2019. One of them also allegedly sexually abused two children. The other was extradited in October from Paraguay, where he had lived for a few years.
A third suspect is accused of acting as an administrator and moderator for the platform as well as sexually abusing two children. Prosecutors say that the fourth man was “one of the most active users” of the platform.
All four are in custody.
The Frankfurt state court now has to decide whether the case will go to trial and if so when. Prosecutors said investigations of other suspected members of the platform are continuing.
WASHINGTON, darknet market marketplace April 5 (Reuters) – The U.S.
Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Tuesday on a Russia-based darknet marketdark market link site and dark web sites a cryptocurrency exchange that it said operates primarily out of Moscow and St. Petersburg.
The sanctions against Russia-Based Hydra and currency exchange Garantex, best darknet market markets published on the Treasury Department’s website, “send a message today to criminals that you cannot hide on the darknet market or their forums, and you cannot hide in Russia or anywhere else in the world,” U.S.
BERLIN, May 3 (Reuters) – German police have uncovered one of the world’s largest underground websites for child pornography with more than 400,000 users and darknet market markets onion arrested four people connected to the platform, prosecutors said on Monday.
The “BOYSTOWN” platform has existed since at least June 2019 and was only accessible via the so-called darknet market, the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office and the BKA Federal Police said in a statement.
The website has more than 400,000 users and was used for the worldwide exchange of child pornography.
It enabled members to retrieve child pornography content and exchange footage with each other in chat areas as well as via voice channels.
“Among the images and video recordings shared were also recordings of the most severe sexual abuse of young children,” prosecutors said.
Police arrested three main suspects, who are accused of operating and maintaining the platform, Darkmarket Url during raids on seven properties in mid-April.
The suspects are a 40-year-old man living in Paderborn in western Germany, a 49-year-old man from the Munich area and a 58-year-old man from northern Germany who has been living in South America for several years, police said.
A fourth man, a 64-year-old from Hamburg, has also been arrested on suspicion of having registered as a member of the platform in July 2019 and dark darknet market onion having posted over 3,500 contributions on the site, making him one of the most active users.
Following the raids, the BOYSTOWN platform has been taken down, police said.
(Reporting by Caroline Copley; Editing by Giles Elgood)
US guns make up as much as 60 percent of the weapons on sale on the dark web, new research has found.
Related links
Weapons, tor drug market drugs and tor drug darknet market stolen identities are readily available on the dark web, a . To investigate where guns, ammunition and guides to their use come from, darknet market lists the UK’s University of Manchester and think tank Rand darkmarket list Europe — or cryptomarkets — and found 811 listings relevant to the study, published Wednesday.
Most weapons were from the USA, where , darknet market and most sales were destined for Europe. A gun bought from the dark web was used in a .
“The dark web is both an enabler for the trade of illegal weapons already on the black darknet market lists and a potential source of diversion for weapons legally owned”, said Giacomo Persi Paoli, the report’s lead author. “The ability for criminals and terrorists, as well as vulnerable or fixated individuals, to make virtually anonymous purchases is perhaps the most dangerous aspect.”
On Thursday, US and European law enforcement agencies the , two of the three largest dark web darknet markets onion address.
THE HAGUE, April 19 (Reuters) – The number of cross-border drug trafficking cases referred to the European agency for prosecutorial cooperation nearly doubled in four years to 562 in 2020, partly driven by a huge increase in the production of synthetic drugs, the agency said.
In a report published on Monday Eurojust said drug trafficking in the European Union alone has an estimated value of 30 billion euros ($36 billion) annually.
The rapid rise of production of synthetic drugs such as methamphetamines and their sale via online darknet market places on the darknet market poses a big challenge to prosecutors across the European Union.
“By rapidly changing the composition of chemicals used for these drugs … or creating new substances, producers try to exploit legal gaps and avoid prosecution,” Eurojust said in a statement.
According to the report by the European prosecutor’s body, the total number of cases involving cross-border drug trafficking nearly doubled to 562 from 279 between 2016 and 2020.
Synthetic and darknet market links other new drugs made up almost one-third of them.
The Eurojust report said producers of new psychoactive drugs often don’t work in old-fashion hierarchical drug trafficking networks and sale and darkmarket 2024 distribution are done online.
“This phenomenon has increased due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with organised crime groups adapting quickly to an online environment, using secured communication channels, crypto-phones, cryptocurrencies and darknet market markets,” Eurojust said.
Likewise consumers of the drugs are also shifting to the darknet market, darkmarket list paying online and receiving the drugs in the mail, it added, making prosecution complicated.
($1 = 0.8317 euros) (Reporting by Stephanie van den Berg; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)
The social media site, which darknet 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 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 , dark websites 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 dark market url finding content on Gab that “promotes and encourages violence against people.” , darknet markets links Stripe, Joyent, Shopify and Medium also cut ties with Gab.
Gab isn’t the only social network that’s been used by extremists. Facebook, 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 tor drug darknet market host pull their services because of its content. Last year, dark web marketplaces the neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer after being booted by GoDaddy and Google. Gab, for its part, dark market list is operating on the surface web for 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.
: Everything you need to know about why tech is under Washington’s microscope.
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, darkmarket url 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, 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 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 darkmarket url providing Wi-Fi.
Officials chose the city’s rundown area to serve as its Innovation District because they wanted to redevelop it, darknet markets 2024 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 worms, for instance.
Darktrace, in contrast, doesn’t look at a massive database of malware that’s come before. Instead, it looks for 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, says , dark market 2024 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, darknet market magazine 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 marketdark 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.”
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