Underground market | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A dark web drugs kingpin who was arrested last year when he arrived in the United States to compete in the World Beard and Mustache Championships has now been sentenced to 20 years in prison. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Robert N. Scola sentenced 36-year-old French national Gal Vallerius, aka "OxyMonster," after pleading guilty to conspiracy to possess with the intent to distribute controlled substances and conspiracy to launder money in June this year. According to a press release published by the U.S. Department of Justice, Vallerius was an administrator, senior moderator and vendor on Dream Market —one of the largest dark web marketplaces for illegal narcotics and drug paraphernalia. Launched in November 2013, Dream Market began operating on the TOR "dark web" network and was designed to make it easier for people to anonymously buy and sell illegal items and services in exchange for Bitcoin and other peer-to-peer cryptocurrencies. Vallerius initi...

If you can't find it on Google, you will definitely find it on the Dark Web . Black markets on the Dark web are not known for just buying drugs, it is a massive hidden network where you can buy pretty much anything you can imagine—from pornography, weapon, and counterfeit currencies, to hacking tools, exploits, malware, and zero-days. One such type of underground marketplace on Dark Web is RDP Shop, a platform from where anyone can buy RDP access (remote desktop protocol) to thousands of hacked machines for a small fee. While investigating several underground RDP shops, security researchers from the McAfee's Advanced Threat Research team discovered that someone is selling remote access linked to security systems at a major International airport for as low as $10. Yes, that's $10, I didn't miss any zeros. Instead of buying RDP credential, researchers used the Shodan search engine to find the correct IP address of the hacked Windows Server machine, whose ad...

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...

AlphaBay Market, one of the largest Dark Web marketplaces for drugs, guns, and other illegal goods, suddenly disappeared overnight without any explanation from its admins, leaving its customers who have paid large sums in panic. AlphaBay , also known as "the new Silk Road," has been shut down since Tuesday night. The site also came in the news at the beginning of this year when a hacker successfully hacked the AlphaBay site and stole over 200,000 private unencrypted messages from several users. Although the website sometimes goes down for maintenance, customers are speculating that the admins have stolen all their Bitcoins for good measure, when heard no words from the site's admins on the downtime. Some users at Reddit and Twitter are claiming that AlphaBay's admins may have shut down the marketplace to withdraw a huge number of bitcoins from the site's accounts. The withdrawal Bitcoin transactions total 1,479.03904709 Bitcoin (roughly $3.8 Million),...

The insider threat is the worst nightmare for a company, as the employees can access company's most sensitive data without having to circumvent security measures designed to keep out external threats. The rogue employee can collect, leak, or sell all your secrets, including professional, confidential, and upcoming project details, to your rival companies and much more that could result in significant loss to your company. And this is exactly what is happening on Dark Web Marketplace -- a place where one can sell and purchase everything from illicit drugs to exploits, malware, and stolen data. According to a new report from the US-based risk security firm RedOwl and Israeli threat intelligence firm IntSights, staff at corporations are selling company's internal secrets for cash to hackers on one of the most famous dark web markets Kick Ass Marketplace ( Onion URL ). Besides selling their company's secret information, researchers also found evidence of rogue staff...

Do you know: There is a vast section of the Internet which is hidden and not accessible through regular search engines and web browsers. This part of the Internet is known as the Deep Web , and it is about 500 times the size of the Web that we know. What is DEEP WEB? Deep Web  is referred to the data which are not indexed by any standard search engine such as Google or Yahoo. The 'Deep Web' refers to all web pages that search engines cannot find, such as user databases, registration-required web forums, webmail pages, and pages behind paywalls. Then, there's the Dark Web or Dark Net – a specific part of that hidden Deep Web. Deep Web and Dark Web are the intriguing topics for the Netizens all around. But when you hear the term 'Deep Web' or 'Dark Web,' you usually categorize them into one. If yes, then you are wrong. What is DARK WEB? Dark Web is where you can operate without been tracked, maintaining total anonymity....

A former employee of Russian search engine Yandex allegedly stole the source code and key algorithms for its search engine site and then attempted to sell them on the black market to fund his own startup. Russian publication Kommersant reports that Dmitry Korobov downloaded a type of software nicknamed " Arcadia " from Yandex's servers, which contained highly critical information, including the source code and some of the "key algorithms," of its search engine. Korobov then tried to sell the stolen codes to an electronics retailer called NIX, where a friend of his allegedly worked, and on the dark underground market in search of potential buyers. But What's the Punchline? The funniest part is that Korobov requested only $25,000 and 250,000 rubles (a total of almost $29,000) for Yandex's source code and algorithms, which actually cost "Billions of Rubles," or somewhere near $15 Million USD . However, Korobov was arrest...

Ross Ulbricht , the alleged founder and mastermind of the infamous online black marketplace Silk Road, has been sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of narcotics conspiracy, money laundering and other criminal charges. This means the 31-year-old San Francisco man will die behind bars . With all the seven charges stemming from the creation and operation of the once the Internet's largest online illegal-drug marketplace, Ulbricht was facing 20 years at a minimum sentence, but making life in prison is the harshest possible sentence. Ulbricht's Life in Prison without any possibility of Parole: The sentence was made by Judge Katherine B. Forrest in a Federal District Court in Manhattan, though Forrest admitted it was a "very, very difficult" call to make , leaving Ulbricht without any hope of parole. Operating online as " Dread Pirate Roberts ," Ulbricht ran the $1.2 billion Empire from the year 2011 to 2013, armed just ...

Evolution -- The largest Deep Web drugs marketplace, disappeared suddenly overnight from the Internet. But unlike Silk Road, there is no indication that the law enforcement took down the Evolution marketplace. The Darknet's most popular markets for drugs and bespoke carjacking services is mysteriously offline Wednesday with rumours circulating over the Internet that its own administrators may have just scammed its huge user base and stole $12 Millions in Bitcoin. The Evolution black marketplace opened in January 2014, and gained popularity after the shutdown of Silk ​Road and arrest of its unassuming founder, Ross U​lbricht , with a promise of less fraud. Like Silk Road , Evolution also dealt in drugs, as well as illegal weapons, counterfeit goods, stolen credit cards and guides to committing fraud. Evolution was only accessible through anonymity Tor network. At the time of its apparent vanish, Evolution was home to nearly 20,000 drug sales, far more than Silk Road...

An all new anonymous online underground black market website, DarkLeaks , has been introduced on the Internet where Whistleblowers, blackmailers, hackers and any individual can trade/sell sensitive and valuable data/secrets anonymously in exchange for Bitcoin payments . DarkLeaks is a decentralized underground blackmarket which is built on top of the Bitcoin Blockchain technology and is available on the Internet to download as a free software package together with its source code published openly on code-sharing site Github . TRADE INFORMATION ANONYMOUSLY DarkLeaks underground black market website is masterminded by the members of crypto-anarchist collective System. " There is no identity, no central operator and no interaction between leaker and buyers, " the developers' statement says. " DarkLeaks is a decentralized black market where you can sell information ," according to the blog post about the new site. " It has a mechanism for trust-less authent...

We often talk about Underground communities, illegal websites or black markets, but as they are 'Underground' in nature i.e. Hidden websites running under Onion Network, many of us don't know how to reach the one we are searching for and if hopefully found, then its difficult to figure out a trustworthy vendor. Underground websites offer illegal high quality drugs or rifles, hacking tools, or any illegal services, until now you needed to type long, complex and specific Tor browser URLs directly into the browser which is quite difficult and sometimes the sites change their addresses which makes more difficult to navigate. Not any More! As the first search engine, ' Grams ' ( https://grams7enufi7jmdl.onion ) for online underground Black Markets has been launched in Beta last week, that lets anyone to easily find illegal drugs and other contraband online in an easier way ever and it's pretty fast like Google Search Engine. You don't need to do anything, just li...

After Silk Road , another underground online marketplace ' Utopia ' has been seized by Dutch National Police ,  where users could buy illegal drugs and guns for home delivery. The police started their investigation under Codename ' Operation Commodore ' in 2013,   and finally  seized Utopia's Germany-based servers and arrested total 5 suspects for running this marketplace. One arrested in  Germany and  other four suspects, aged 29 to 46, were detained in The Netherlands.  Two of them had also been involved in another similar underground website ' Black Market Reloaded ', which was closed in December 2013. Utopia  reportedly launched only last week ( https://ggvow6fj3sehlm45.onion/ ),  intended to become a direct competitor of the Silk Road, was  a ' d ark web ' website, which is accessible only by using Tor anonymity software. The website is now displaying a message:  " This hidden ...

As the year draws to a close, we have seen the number of emerging threats like advance phishing attacks from the Syrian Electronic Army , financial malware and exploit kits, Cryptolocker ransomware infections, massive  Bitcoin theft, extensive privacy breach from NSA and many more. The financial malware's were the most popular threat this year. Money is always a perfect motivation for attackers and cyber criminals who are continually targeting financial institutions. On Tuesday, Antivirus firm Symantec has released a Threat report, called " The State of Financial Trojans: 2013 ", which revealed that over 1,400 financial institutions have been targeted and compromised millions of computers around the globe and the most targeted banks are in the US with 71.5% of all analyzed Trojans. Financial institutions have been fighting against malware for the last ten years to protect their customers and online transactions from threat. Over the time the attackers adapted to these counter...

NSS Labs issued the report titled " The Known Unknowns " to explain the dynamics behind the market of zero-day exploits. Last week I discussed about the necessity to define a model for " cyber conflict " to qualify the principal issues related to the use of cyber tools and cyber weapons in an Information Warfare context, today I decided to give more info to the readers on cyber arsenals of governments. Governments consider the use of cyber weapons as a coadiuvant to conventional weapons, these malicious application could be used for sabotage or for cyber espionage, they could be used to hit a specifically designed software (e.g. SCADA within a critical infrastructure ) or they could be used for large scale operations infecting thousand of machines exploiting zero-day in common application ( e.g. Java platform, Adobe software ). The zero-day flaw are the most important component for the design of an efficient cyber weapon, governments have recently created dedic...

Sheep Marketplace , one of the leading anonymous websites, after Silk Road 's closure by U.S. Prosecutors, allegedly selling drugs, has gone offline claiming it was robbed of $6 million worth of Bitcoins . Like Silk Road , Sheep Marketplace was a Deep Web site accessible via the Tor network and quickly grew into a replacement of other popular underground Bazaars. Weeks ago, the Administrator of the Sheep Marketplace announced that withdrawals  from online Wallet would be closed for a few hours as a new feature was being implemented, however deposits were still allowed. Recently, The market's administration left a short message for users, which reads: We are sorry to say, but we were robbed on Saturday 11/21/2013 by vendor EBOOK101. This vendor found a bug in the system and stole 5400 BTC – your money, our provisions, all was stolen. We were trying to resolve this problem, but we were not successful. We are sorry for your problems and inconvenience, all of the current BTC w...

The FBI had seized a website called ' Silk Road ', that was considered one of the most popular Underground places on the Internet for buying drugs and other illicit goods and services. They arrested the site's alleged founder,  Ross William Ulbricht, known as " Dread Pirate Roberts ," in San Francisco, who reportedly had  26,000 Bitcoins worth $3.6 million. The FBI used information from Comcast in the investigation and collaborated with US Customs and Border Patrol, the Internal Revenue Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Department of Homeland Security. Ross Ulbricht Ross William Ulbricht, a 29-year-old graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Materials Science and Engineering  charged with one count each of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy, according to the filing. ' Silk Road '  website, which had operated since early 2011, also offered tut...