Personal Cybersecurity by Marvin Waschke

Author:Marvin Waschke
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Apress, Berkeley, CA

Criminal Darknet Sites

Criminal darknet sites are almost always for members only. The site administrators vet account applications carefully and require endorsements from existing members. Some require evidence of past crimes before granting membership. The admission procedures are intended to keep out law enforcement . They are also to enforce “honor among thieves.” Even a criminal trading exchange must have reliable trading rules, and most sites police their rules.

Although admission policies are important for maintaining the darknet, illegal commerce could not exist without protocols like Tor that foster anonymity and make messages difficult to trace and invisible to the ordinary Internet , even though these networks use the same communications infrastructure as the ordinary Internet.

Estimates of the number of sites on the darknet vary. It is probably considerably less than a million and likely more than 100,000. These sites for illegal trade are crucial to the cybercrime ecosystem. Forty million credit cards (the take from the Target heist) cannot be effectively exploited by a small group of hackers . Carding , turning stolen payment card information into cash, requires feet on the street making fraudulent payment card purchases and fencing the loot. Carding requires skill at face-to-face deception and the logistics of disposal of stolen goods, not technical hacking skills. Without convenient darknet intermediaries managing the division of labor between technical and street criminals, hacking would be far less lucrative.

The trade on these criminal sites parallels the development of online commerce by firms such as eBay and Amazon. Online commerce has proven to be far reaching and effective. Drug sellers or dealers in any kind of stolen or illegal goods and services reap the same advantages. Anonymity of transactions, including payments using crypto-currencies such a bitcoin , are added attractions.

The criminal sites do more to facilitate cybercrime . They also act as an exchange for technical information useful to other hackers , Sometimes the information is freely published. In other cases, the information is sold; often this information is a description of an exploitable weakness in an operating system or application . These exchanges also sell prepackaged code that less-skilled or unskilled hackers use to launch attacks.

These sites are usually developed and maintained by technically oriented hackers , but the participants include less-technical criminals trafficking in illegal goods and services such as stolen art, extreme pornography , illegal or restricted drugs, and weapons. If it is illegal, it is probably sold somewhere on the darknet.

Law enforcement , lead in the U.S. by the FBI, have been working to take these criminal sites down. In 2008, a large site was taken down through the efforts of an undercover agent who became an administrator of the site. The FBI estimated that the site, Dark Market , had approximately 2,500 registered users. Fifty-six arrests were made in the takedown. The FBI estimated that 70 million dollars in potential losses were prevented.14

In October of 2013, The Silk Road site was taken down and the operator, the so-called Dread Pirate Roberts , was arrested. Per the

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