Tor network | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

German authorities have announced the takedown of an illicit underground marketplace called  Nemesis Market  that peddled narcotics, stolen data, and various cybercrime services. The Federal Criminal Police Office (aka Bundeskriminalamt or BKA) said it seized the digital infrastructure associated with the darknet service located in Germany and Lithuania and confiscated €94,000 ($102,107) in cryptocurrency assets. The operation, conducted in collaboration with law enforcement agencies from Germany, Lithuania, and the U.S., took place on March 20, 2024, following an extensive investigation that commenced in October 2022. Founded in 2021, Nemesis Market is estimated to have had more than 150,000 user accounts and 1,100 seller accounts from all over the world prior to its shutdown. Almost 20$ of the seller accounts were from Germany. "The range of goods available on the marketplace included narcotics, fraudulently obtained data and goods, as well as a selection of cybercrime ...

The threat actors behind the LockBit ransomware operation have resurfaced on the dark web using new infrastructure, days after an international law enforcement exercise  seized control  of its servers. To that end, the notorious group has moved its data leak portal to a new .onion address on the TOR network, listing 12 new victims as of writing. The administrator behind LockBit, in a  lengthy follow-up message , said some of their websites were confiscated by most likely exploiting a critical PHP flaw tracked as CVE-2023-3824, acknowledging that they didn't update PHP due to "personal negligence and irresponsibility." "I realize that it may not have been this CVE, but something else like 0-day for PHP, but I can't be 100% sure, because the version installed on my servers was already known to have a known vulnerability, so this is most likely how the victims' admin and chat panel servers and the blog server were accessed," they noted. They also cla...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

The U.S. Justice Department (DoJ) has officially  announced  the disruption of the BlackCat ransomware operation and released a decryption tool that more than 500 affected victims can use to regain access to files locked by the malware. Court documents show that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) enlisted the help of a confidential human source (CHS) to act as an affiliate for the BlackCat group and gain access to a web panel used for managing the gang's victims, in what's a case of hacking the hackers. The confiscation effort involved collaboration and assistance from multiple law enforcement agencies from the U.S., Germany, Denmark, Australia, the U.K., Spain, Switzerland, and Austria. BlackCat , also called ALPHV, GOLD BLAZER, and Noberus,  first emerged  in December 2021 and has since gone on to be the second most prolific ransomware-as-a-service variant in the world after LockBit. It's also the first Rust-language-based ransomware strain spotted ...

An advanced strain of malware masquerading as a cryptocurrency miner has managed to fly the radar for over five years, infecting no less than one million devices around the world in the process. That's according to findings from Kaspersky, which has codenamed the threat  StripedFly , describing it as an "intricate modular framework that supports both Linux and Windows." The Russian cybersecurity vendor, which first detected the samples in 2017, said the miner is part of a much larger entity that employs a custom  EternalBlue SMBv1 exploit  attributed to the Equation Group in order to infiltrate publicly-accessible systems. The malicious shellcode, delivered via the exploit, has the ability to download binary files from a remote Bitbucket repository as well as execute PowerShell scripts. It also supports a collection of plugin-like expandable features to harvest sensitive data and even uninstall itself. The platform's shellcode is injected in the  wininit.exe pro...

Finnish law enforcement authorities have announced the takedown of PIILOPUOTI, a dark web marketplace that specialized in illegal narcotics trade since May 2022. "The site operated as a hidden service in the encrypted TOR network," the Finnish Customs (aka Tulli)  said  in a brief announcement on Tuesday. "The site has been used in anonymous criminal activities such as narcotics trade." The agency said that the drugs sold on the site were smuggled to Finland from abroad, adding a criminal investigation is underway in coordination with international partners from Germany and Lithuania, along with Europol and Eurojust. It's not immediately clear if any arrests were made. Romanian cybersecurity firm Bitdefender said it provided additional support that helped with the seizure of PIILOPUOTI. "We are extremely pleased that PIILOPUOTI has been seized and would like to congratulate law enforcement, Finnish Customs, and everyone involved," Alexandru Catal...

A nascent service called Dark Utilities has already attracted 3,000 users for its ability to provide command-and-control (C2) services with the goal of commandeering compromised systems. "It is marketed as a means to enable remote access, command execution, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and cryptocurrency mining operations on infected systems," Cisco Talos  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Dark Utilities, which emerged in early 2022, is advertised as a "C2-as-a-Service" (C2aaS), offering access to infrastructure hosted on the clearnet as well as the TOR network and associated payloads with support for Windows, Linux, and Python-based implementations for a mere €9.99. Authenticated users on the platform are presented with a dashboard that makes it possible to generate new payloads tailored to a specific operating system that can then be deployed and executed on victim hosts. Additionally, users are provided an administrative panel ...

The clearnet and dark web payment portals operated by the  Conti  ransomware group have gone down in what appears to be an attempt to shift to new infrastructure after details about the gang's inner workings and its members were made public. According to  MalwareHunterTeam , "while both the clearweb and Tor domains of the leak site of the Conti ransomware gang is online and working, both their clearweb and Tor domains for the payment site (which is obviously more important than the leak) is down." It's not clear what prompted the shutdown, but the development comes as Swiss cybersecurity firm PRODAFT  offered  an unprecedented look into the group's ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) model, wherein the developers sell or lease their ransomware technology to affiliates hired from darknet forums, who then carry out attacks on their behalf while also netting about 70% of each ransom payment extorted from the victims. The result? Three members of the Conti team have...

An unknown threat actor managed to control more than 27% of the entire Tor network exit capacity in early February 2021, a new study on the dark web infrastructure revealed. "The entity attacking Tor users is actively exploiting tor users since over a year and expanded the scale of their attacks to a new record level," an independent security researcher who goes by the name nusenu  said  in a write-up published on Sunday. "The average exit fraction this entity controlled was above 14% throughout the past 12 months." It's the latest in a series of efforts undertaken to bring to light malicious Tor activity perpetrated by the actor since  December 2019 . The attacks, which are said to have begun in January 2020, were first  documented and exposed  by the same researcher in August 2020. Tor is open-source software for enabling anonymous communication on the Internet. It obfuscates the source and destination of a web request by directing network traffic through...

Europol announced the shut down of two prolific dark web marketplaces— Wall Street Market and Silkkitie (also known as Valhalla)—in simultaneous global operations against underground websites for trading drugs, stolen credit card numbers, malicious software, and other illegal goods. Police in western Germany has also arrested three men who were allegedly running Wall Street Market, the world's second largest dark marketplace with more than a million users and 5,400 vendors. Besides this, the operation involving Europol , Dutch police and the FBI also led to the arrests of two major suppliers of narcotics via the Wall Street Market site in Los Angeles, the United States. According to the Europol, the police officers seized the computers used to run the illegal market place, along with more than €550 000 (£472,000 or $621,000) in cash, more than €1 Million in Bitcoin and Monero cryptocurrencies, expensive cars, and other evidence. In a press release published today, Eu...

The Tor Project has made some significant changes to its infrastructure by improving the way the 'onion' network protects its users' privacy and security. Since the beginning, the largest free online anonymity network has been helping users browse the web anonymously, and its onion service provides a network within which encrypted websites can be run anonymously. However, the infrastructure design and encryption behind the service has become little outdated, eventually leaving it vulnerable to potential and resourceful attackers. Tor network has become such a potential target that even Zerodium, a company that acquires and resells zero-day exploits, is ready to pay $1 million for Tor zero-day exploits . Keeping these concerns in mind, the Tor Project has been working to upgrade its infrastructure over the past four years, and the good news is… A few weeks ago, the Tor Project announced the release of Tor 0.3.2.1-alpha that includes support for the next generati...

United States authorities arrested suspected dark web drug kingpin late last month while he was travelling from his base in France to the United States of America for this year's annual World Beard and Mustache Championships. Gal Vallerius, a 38-year-old French national, was travelling to Austin, Texas, for the competition but was caught by U.S. authorities on August 31 upon landing at Atlanta International Airport on a distribution complaint filed in Miami federal court, The Miami Herald reported Tuesday. Authorities confirmed Vallerius' identity to the online moniker " OxyMonster ," which was previously used to sell drugs on an illegal underground dark web marketplace called Dream Market by searching his laptop that the brown-beard contestant carried with him. Alleged Moderator/Admin Of Dark-Web Dream Market According to Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) affidavit filed in September, Vallerius was an administrator, senior moderator and vendor on Dream ...

It seems like Tor Browser zero-day exploits are in high demand right now—so much so that someone is ready to pay ONE MILLION dollars. Zerodium—a company that specialises in acquiring and reselling zero-day exploits—just announced that it will pay up to USD 1,000,000 for working zero-day exploits for the popular Tor Browser on Tails Linux and Windows operating system. Tor browser users should take this news an early warning, especially who use Tails OS to protect their privacy. Zero-day exploit acquisition platform has also published some rules and payout details on its website, announcing that the payout for Tor exploits with no JavaScript has been kept double than those with JavaScript enabled. The company has also clearly mentioned that the exploit must leverage remote code execution vulnerability, the initial attack vector should be a web page and it should work against the latest version of Tor Browser. Moreover, the zero-day Tor exploit must work without requiring an...

By now you might be aware of the took down of two of the largest online dark websites— AlphaBay and Hansa —in what's being called the largest-ever international operation against the dark web's black market conducted by the FBI, DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) and Dutch National Police. But the interesting aspect of the takedown was that the federal authorities shut down AlphaBay , but took control of the Hansa market and kept it running for at least a month in an effort to monitor the activities of its visitors. The visitors of Hansa market also included a massive flood of Alphabay refugees, as the seizer of AlphaBay Market forced their visitors to join the Hansa market for illegal trading and purchasing. However, not just Hansa, after AlphaBay's shutdown , many of its users also joined another website known as Dream Market, which is believed to be the second-largest dark web marketplace, ahead of Hansa. After the shutdown of both AlphaBay and Hansa, Dream Market ...

Dark Web is right now going through a very rough time. Just two days ago, a hacker group affiliated with Anonymous broke into the servers of Freedom Hosting II and took down more than 10,000 Tor-based .onion dark websites with an alarming announcement to its visitors, which said: " Hello, Freedom Hosting II, you have been hacked. " Freedom Hosting II is the single largest host of underground websites accessible only through Tor anonymising browser that hosts somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of all sites on the Dark Web, anonymity and privacy researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis estimated . Besides defacing all Dark Web sites hosted on Freedom Hosting II with the same message and stealing its database, the hackers also demanded a ransom for 0.1 Bitcoin (just over $100) to return the compromised data to the hosting service. Now, it has been reported that the stolen database from Freedom Hosting II has publicly been released online to a site hosted on the Tor network, wh...

The critical Firefox vulnerability being actively exploited in the wild to unmask Tor users has been patched with the release of new browser updates. Both Mozilla and Tor Project has patched the vulnerability that allows attackers to remotely execute malicious code on Windows operating system via memory corruption vulnerability in Firefox web browser. Tor Browser Bundle is a repackaged version of the open-source Mozilla Firefox browser that runs connections through the Tor anonymizing network configured to hide its user's public IP address. However, the exploit code released by an unnamed online user was currently being exploited against Tor Browser users to leak the potentially identifying information of Tor users. "The security flaw responsible for this urgent release is already actively exploited on Windows systems," an official of the anonymity network wrote in an advisory published on Wednesday.  "Even though there is currently...no similar explo...

Today, most users surf the web unaware of the fact that websites collect their data and track their locations – and if this is not enough, then there are hackers and cyber criminals who can easily steal sensitive data from the ill-equipped. In short, the simple truth is that you have no or very little privacy when you're online. So, if you're worried about identity thieves, or ISPs spying on or throttling your traffic, the most efficient way to secure your privacy on the Internet is to avoid using public networks; use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) instead. When it comes to digital security, the first thing most users probably think of is a good Antivirus for protecting their sensitive data on their systems. But, what they forget is that the data they send over the Internet needs protection, too. That's where Virtual Private Network (VPN) services come in. VPN allows you to access a private network securely and to share data remotely through public networks, ...