Underground Marketplace | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

An Israeli national was sentenced to 97 months in prison in connection with operating the DeepDotWeb ( DDW ) clearnet website, nearly a year after the individual pleaded guilty to the charges. Tal Prihar, 37, an Israeli citizen residing in Brazil, is said to have played the role of an administrator of DDW since the website became functional in October 2013. He  pleaded guilty  to money laundering charges in March 2021 and agreed to forfeit the illegally amassed profits. DDW, until its seizure in May 2019, ostensibly  served  as a "news" website that connected internet users with underground marketplaces on the dark web that operate via darknets such as Tor, enabling the purchase of illegal firearms, malware and hacking tools, stolen financial data, heroin, fentanyl, and other illicit materials. Prihar, acting in cohorts with co-defendant Michael Phan, 34, of Israel, provided direct links to illegal marketplaces and in return for advertising these links, reaped s...

Europol on Tuesday said it shut down DarkMarket, the world's largest online marketplace for illicit goods, as part of an  international operation  involving Germany, Australia, Denmark, Moldova, Ukraine, the U.K.'s National Crime Agency (NCA), and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). At the time of closure, DarkMarket is believed to have had 500,000 users and more than 2,400 vendors, with over 320,000 transactions resulting in the transfer of more than 4,650 bitcoin and 12,800 monero — a sum total of €140 million ($170 million). The illegal internet market specialized in the sales of drugs, counterfeit money, stolen or forged credit card information, anonymous SIM cards, and off-the-shelf malware. In addition, the months-long intelligence operation also resulted in the arrest of a 34-year-old Australian national near the German-Danish border over the weekend, who is alleged to be the mastermind behind DarkMarket. According to  The Guardian , DarkMarket ca...

The latest Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 Cloud Threat Report found that sensitive data is found in 66% of cloud storage buckets. This data is vulnerable to ransomware attacks. The SANS Institute recently reported that these attacks can be performed by abusing the cloud provider's storage security controls and default settings. "In just the past few months, I have witnessed two different methods for executing a ransomware attack using nothing but legitimate cloud security features," warns Brandon Evans, security consultant and SANS Certified Instructor. Halcyon disclosed an attack campaign that leveraged one of Amazon S3's native encryption mechanisms, SSE-C, to encrypt each of the target buckets. A few months prior, security consultant Chris Farris demonstrated how attackers could perform a similar attack using a different AWS security feature, KMS keys with external key material, using simple scripts generated by ChatGPT. "Clearly, this topic is top-of-mind for both threat actors and ...