darknet | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A coalition of international law enforcement agencies has seized the website associated with the cryptocurrency exchange Garantex ("garantex[.]org"), nearly three years after the service was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in April 2022. "The domain for Garantex has been seized by the United States Secret Service pursuant to a seizure warrant obtained by the United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia under the authority of 18 U.S.C. §§ 981 and 982," reads a seizure banner on the website. The operation was carried out in coordination with the U.S. Department of Justice's Criminal Division, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Europol, the Dutch National Police, the German Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt aka BKA), the Frankfurt General Prosecutor's Office, the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation, and the Estonian National Criminal Police. Founded in 2019, Garantex was previously subject to U....

The 36-year-old founder of the Bitcoin Fog cryptocurrency mixer has been sentenced to 12 years and six months in prison for facilitating money laundering activities between 2011 and 2021. Roman Sterlingov, a dual Russian-Swedish national, pleaded guilty to charges of money laundering and operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business earlier this March. The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) described Bitcoin Fog as the darknet's longest-running cryptocurrency mixer , allowing cybercriminals to conceal the source of their cryptocurrency proceeds. "Over the course of its decade-long operation, Bitcoin Fog gained notoriety as a go-to money laundering service for criminals seeking to hide their illicit proceeds from law enforcement and processed transactions involving over 1.2 million bitcoin, valued at approximately $400 million at the time the transactions occurred," the DoJ said . "The bulk of this cryptocurrency came from darknet marketplaces and was tied ...

The problem is simple: all breaches start with initial access, and initial access comes down to two primary attack vectors – credentials and devices. This is not news; every report you can find on the threat landscape depicts the same picture.  The solution is more complex. For this article, we'll focus on the device threat vector. The risk they pose is significant, which is why device management tools like Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) are essential components of an organization's security infrastructure. However, relying solely on these tools to manage device risk actually creates a false sense of security. Instead of the blunt tools of device management, organizations are looking for solutions that deliver device trust . Device trust provides a comprehensive, risk-based approach to device security enforcement, closing the large gaps left behind by traditional device management solutions. Here are 5 of those limitations and how to ov...

The Dutch police have announced the takedown of Bohemia and Cannabia, which has been described as the world's largest and longest-running dark web market for illegal goods, drugs, and cybercrime services. The takedown is the result of a collaborative investigation with Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States that began towards the end of 2022, the Politie said. The marketplace discontinued its operations in late 2023 following reports of service disruptions and exit scams after one of its developers allegedly went rogue in what was characterized by one of the administrators as a "shameful and disgruntled set of events." Bohemia is said to have served 82,000 ads worldwide every day, with about 67,000 transactions taking place each month. In September 2023 alone, the estimated turnover was €12 million. "Some of the sellers in the market advertised shipping from the Netherlands," the Politie said . "An initial analysis shows that at least 14...

Cryptocurrency analysts have shed light on an online marketplace called HuiOne Guarantee that's widely used by cybercriminals in Southeast Asia, particularly those linked to pig butchering scams. "Merchants on the platform offer technology, data, and money laundering services, and have engaged in transactions totaling at least $11 billion," Elliptic said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The British blockchain analytics firm said that the marketplace is part of HuiOne Group, a Cambodian conglomerate with links to Cambodia's ruling Hun family and that another HuiOne business, HuiOne International Payments, is actively involved in laundering scam proceeds globally. According to its website , HuiOne's financial services arm is said to have 500,000 registered users. It also touts Alipay, Huawei, PayGo Wallet, UnionPay, and Yes Seatel as its customers. Southeast Asian countries like Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, and the Philippines have become...

The Cyber Police of Ukraine has announced the arrest of a local man who is suspected to have offered their services to LockBit and Conti ransomware groups. The unnamed 28-year-old native of the Kharkiv region allegedly specialized in the development of crypters to encrypt and obfuscate malicious payloads in order to evade detection by security programs. The product is believed to have been offered to the Conti and LockBit ransomware syndicates that then used the crypter to disguise the file-encrypting malware and launch successful attacks. "And at the end of 2021, members of the [Conti] group infected the computer networks of enterprises in the Netherlands and Belgium with hidden malware," according to a translated version of the statement released by the agency. As part of the investigation, authorities conducted searches in Kyiv and Kharkiv, and seized computer equipment, mobile phones, and notebooks. If found guilty, the defendant is expected to face up to 15 years ...

A forensic analysis of a graph dataset containing transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain has revealed clusters associated with illicit activity and money laundering, including detecting criminal proceeds sent to a crypto exchange and previously unknown wallets belonging to a Russian darknet market. The  findings  come from Elliptic in collaboration with researchers from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. The 26 GB dataset, dubbed  Elliptic2 , is a "large graph dataset containing 122K labeled subgraphs of Bitcoin clusters within a background graph consisting of 49M node clusters and 196M edge transactions," the co-authors  said  in a paper shared with The Hacker News. Elliptic2 builds on the  Elliptic Data Set  (aka Elliptic1), a transaction graph that was made public in July 2019 with the goal of  combating financial crime  using graph convolutional neural networks ( GCNs ). The idea, in a nutshell, is to uncover u...

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 ...

Update: The U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA) has confirmed the takedown of LockBit infrastructure. Read here for more details . An international law enforcement operation has led to the seizure of multiple darknet domains operated by  LockBit , one of the most prolific ransomware groups, marking the latest in a long list of digital takedowns. While the full extent of the effort, codenamed  Operation Cronos , is presently unknown, visiting the group's .onion website displays a seizure banner containing the message "The site is now under the control of law enforcement." Authorities from 11 countries, Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K., and the U.S., alongside Europol participated in the joint exercise. Malware research group VX-Underground, in a  message  posted on X (formerly Twitter), said the websites were taken down by exploiting a critical security flaw impacting PHP ( CVE-2023-3824 , CVSS score...

Picture this: you stumble upon a concealed secret within your company's source code. Instantly, a wave of panic hits as you grasp the possible consequences. This one hidden secret has the power to pave the way for unauthorized entry, data breaches, and a damaged reputation. Understanding the secret is just the beginning; swift and resolute action becomes imperative. However, lacking the necessary context, you're left pondering the optimal steps to take. What's the right path forward in this situation? Secrets management is an essential aspect of any organization's security strategy. In a world where breaches are increasingly common, managing sensitive information such as API keys, credentials, and tokens can make all the difference. Secret scanners play a role in identifying exposed secrets within source code, but they have one significant limitation:  they don't provide context. And without context, it's impossible to devise an appropriate response plan. Con...

The U.S. Treasury Department on Wednesday imposed sanctions against  Sinbad , a virtual currency mixer that has been put to use by the North Korea-linked  Lazarus Group  to launder ill-gotten proceeds. "Sinbad has processed millions of dollars' worth of virtual currency from Lazarus Group heists, including the Horizon Bridge and Axie Infinity heists," the department said . "Sinbad is also used by cybercriminals to obfuscate transactions linked to malign activities such as sanctions evasion, drug trafficking, the purchase of child sexual abuse materials, and additional illicit sales on darknet marketplaces." In addition to the sanctions, Sinbad had its website seized as part of a coordinated law enforcement action between agencies in the U.S., Finland, and the Netherlands. The development builds on prior actions undertaken by governments in Europe and the U.S. to blockade mixers such as  Blender ,  Tornado Cash , and  ChipMixer , all of which have been...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has given a November 17, 2023, deadline for federal agencies and organizations to apply mitigations to secure against a number of security flaws in Juniper Junos OS that came to light in August. The agency on Monday  added  five vulnerabilities to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation - CVE-2023-36844  (CVSS score: 5.3) - Juniper Junos OS EX Series PHP External Variable Modification Vulnerability CVE-2023-36845  (CVSS score: 5.3) - Juniper Junos OS EX Series and SRX Series PHP External Variable Modification Vulnerability CVE-2023-36846  (CVSS score: 5.3) - Juniper Junos OS SRX Series Missing Authentication for Critical Function Vulnerability CVE-2023-36847  (CVSS score: 5.3) - Juniper Junos OS EX Series Missing Authentication for Critical Function Vulnerability CVE-2023-36851  (CVSS score: 5.3) - Juniper Junos OS SRX Series M...

Malaysian law enforcement authorities have  announced  the takedown of a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) operation called  BulletProofLink . The Royal Malaysia Police said the effort, which was carried out with assistance from the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on November 6, 2023, was based on information that the threat actors behind the platform were based out of the country. To that end, eight individuals aged between 29 and 56, including the syndicate's mastermind, have been arrested across different locations in Sabah, Selangor, Perak, and Kuala Lumpur, New Straits Times  reported . Along with the arrests, authorities confiscated servers, computers, jewelry, vehicles, and cryptocurrency wallets containing approximately $213,000. BulletProofLink , also called BulletProftLink, is known for offering ready-to-use phishing templates on a subscription basis to other actors for conducting credential harvesting ca...

A U.S. national has pleaded guilty in a Missouri court to operating a darknet carding site and selling financial information belonging to tens of thousands of victims in the country. Michael D. Mihalo , aka Dale Michael Mihalo Jr. and ggmccloud1, has been accused of setting up a carding site called Skynet Market that specialized in the trafficking of credit and debit card data. Mihalo and his associates also peddled their warez on other dark web marketplaces such as AlphaBay Market, Wall Street Market, and Hansa Market between February 22, 2016, and October 1, 2019. "Mihalo assembled and directed the team that helped him sell this stolen financial information on the darknet," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ)  said  in a press statement released on May 16, 2023. "Mihalo personally possessed, sent, and received the information associated with 49,084 stolen payment cards with the intent that the payment card information would be trafficked on darknet sites, all i...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a darknet marketplace called  InTheBox  that's designed to specifically cater to mobile malware operators. The actor behind the criminal storefront, believed to be available since at least January 2020, has been offering over 400 custom web injects grouped by geography that can be purchased by other adversaries looking to mount attacks of their own. "The automation allows other bad actors to create orders to receive the most up to date web injects for further implementation into mobile malware," Resecurity  said . "InTheBox may be called the largest and probably the only one in its marketplace category providing high-quality web injects for popular types of mobile malware." Web injects are  packages  used in financial malware that leverage the adversary-in-the-browser (AitB) attack vector to serve malicious HTML or JavaScript code in the form of an overlay screen when victims launch a banking, crypto, payments, ...

The U.S. Treasury Department on Tuesday sanctioned Hydra, the same day German law enforcement authorities  disrupted  the world's largest and longest-running dark web marketplace following a coordinated operation in partnership with U.S. officials. The sanctions are part of an "international effort to disrupt proliferation of malicious cybercrime services, dangerous drugs, and other illegal offerings available through the Russia-based site," the Treasury Department  said  in a statement. Along with the sanctions, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) disclosed a list of  more than 100 virtual currency addresses  that have been identified as associated with the entity's operations to conduct illicit transactions. The sanctions come as Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office shut down the online criminal marketplace that it said specialized in narcotics trade, seizing its servers and 543 bitcoins worth 23 million euros ($25.3 million). Hydra was ...

Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), on Tuesday announced the official takedown of Hydra, the world's largest illegal dark web marketplace that has cumulatively facilitated over $5 billion in Bitcoin transactions to date. "Bitcoins amounting to currently the equivalent of approximately €23 million were seized, which are attributed to the marketplace," the BKA said in a press release. Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic confirmed that the seizure occurred on April 5, 2022 in a series of 88 transactions totaling 543.3 BTC. The agency attributed the shutdown of Hydra to an extensive investigation operation conducted by its Central Office for Combating Cybercrime (ZIT) in partnership with U.S. law enforcement authorities that it said had been underway since August 2021. Launched in 2015, Hydra was a Russian-language darknet marketplace that opened as a competitor to the now-defunct Russian Anonymous Marketplace (aka RAMP), primarily...