Frankfurt prosecutors said in a statement together with the Federal Criminal Police Office that in mid-April three German suspects, said to be the administrators of the ‘Boystown’ platform, were arrested along with a German user.

One of the three main suspects was arrested in Paraguay.

They also searched seven buildings in connection with the porn ring in mid-April in Germany.

The authorities said the platform was ‘one of the world’s biggest child pornography darknet market platforms’ and dark market Onion had been active at least since 2019.

Pedophiles used it to exchange and watch pornography of children and toddlers, most of them boys, from all over the world.

Prosecutors wrote that they found ‘images of most severe sexual abuse of toddlers among the photos and video material.

A German police task force investigated the platform, its administrators and users for months in cooperation with Europol and law enforcement authorities from the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, the United States and Canada, the statement said.

The three main suspects were a 40-year-old man from Paderborn, a 49-year-old man from Munich and a 58-year-old man from northern Germany who had been living in Paraguay for dark market link many years, the prosecutors’ statement said.

They worked as administrators of the site and gave advice to members on how to evade law enforcement when using the platform for illegal child pornography.

A fourth suspect, a 64-year-old man from Hamburg, dark web market links is accused of being one of the most active users of the platform having allegedly uploaded more than 3500 posts.

Germany has requested the extradition of the suspect who was arrested in Paraguay.

After the raids in mid-April, the online platform was shut down.

The post Police bust one of the world's largest child pornography rings appeared first on The News Max.

An Australian man was arrested on Monday accused of running a $220million illegal darkweb marketplace – called the biggest in the world and ‘ for criminals’ – after ha was tracked following the bunker’s discovery. 

The joint investigation by Australian Federal Police, Scotland Yard, the , Europol, and German authorities, among others, arrested the man, 34, as he allegedly tried flee across the Danish border into . 

The man, known only as Julian K, is the alleged operator of DarkMarket and has been detained by German investigators.

DarkMarket was shut down on Monday and its new servers, located in Ukraine and Moldova after relocating from the bunker, were taken off the internet, prosecutors in the city of Koblenz said.

‘Until its closure, DarkMarket was probably the largest marketplace worldwide on the darknet market, with almost 500,000 users and more than 2400 sellers,’ prosecutors said. 

More than 320,000 transactions were conducted via the website including the sale of drugs, counterfeit money, stolen or falsified credit cards, anonymous SIM cards and malware.

The transactions were reportedly worth a total of 4,650 bitcoin and dark darknet market 2023 12,800 monero – two cryptocurrencies – for an equivalent sum of more than $221million. 

The servers will be forensically examined by authorities to uncover information about the website’s operations and criminal network. 

The accused man has already fronted a German court and been denied bail – to be transferred to a German prison in the next few days. 

He has reportedly refused to speak to investigators or court officials. 

German prosecutors said the man was trying to flee Denmark into Germany when arrested and was travelling through Europe either on holiday or conducting business for the illegal website. 

They said the investigation around DarkMarket originated after the discovery of the data processing centre run by criminals in the 5,000sqm former unused bunker in south-west Germany. 

The data facility hosted illegal websites, which included DarkMarket temporarily, darknet market markets 2023 and was shut down in 2019. 

The building, constructed by the West-German military, in the mid-1970s descended five-storeys below the surface and was built with 31inch thick concrete walls to withstand a nuclear blast. 

A meteorological division of the military used the facility after the Cold War until 2012 to forecast weather patterns where German soldiers were deployed. 

The building was sold to a foundation based in Denmark in 2012 after officials could find no other buyers for the vacant facility. 

A number of people were arrested after the discovery of the data centre – accused of being part of a criminal network and being accessories to hundreds of thousands of illegal transactions involving prohibited material such as drugs and hacking tools. 

Some already went on trial in October. 

The darkweb was originally developed for the United States military but has been overrun by criminals because they can conceal their identity on the platform. 

The post Inside busted illegal $220million darknet data centre appeared first on The News Max.

This is part of our  about how innovators are thinking up new ways to make you — and the world around you — smarter. 

---

“Are you a hacker?”

A Las Vegas driver asks me this after I tell him I’m headed to Defcon at Caesars Palace. I wonder if his sweat isn’t just from the 110℉ heat blasting the city.

All week, a cloud of paranoia looms over Las Vegas, as hackers from around the world swarm Sin City for Black Hat and Defcon, two back-to-back cybersecurity conferences taking place in the last week of July. At Caesars Palace, where Defcon is celebrating its 25th anniversary, the UPS store posts a sign telling guests it won’t accept printing requests from USB thumb drives. You can’t be too careful with all those hackers in town.

Everywhere I walk I see hackers — in tin-foiled fedoras, wearing . Mike Spicer, a security researcher, carries a 4-foot-high backpack holding a “Wi-Fi cactus.” Think wires, antennas, colored lights and 25 Wi-Fi scanners that, in seven hours, captured 75 gigabytes of data from anyone foolish enough to use public Wi-Fi. I see a woman thank him for holding the door open for her, all while his backpack sniffs for unencrypted passwords and personal information it can grab literally out of thin air.

You’d think that, with all the potential threats literally walking about town, Vegas’ director of technology and innovation, Mike Sherwood, would be stressed out. It’s his job to protect thousands of smart sensors around the city that could jam traffic, blast water through pipes or cause a blackout if anything goes haywire.

And yet he’s sitting right in front of me at Black Hat, smiling.

His entire three-person team, in fact, is at Black Hat so they can learn how to stave off future attacks. Machine learning is guarding Las Vegas’ network for them.

Broadly speaking, artificial intelligence refers to machines carrying out jobs that we would consider smart. Machine learning is a subset of AI in which computers learn and adapt for themselves.

Now a number of cybersecurity companies are turning to machine learning in an attempt to stay one step ahead of professionals working to steal industrial secrets, disrupt national infrastructures, hold computer networks for Darkmarket Url ransom and even influence elections. Las Vegas, which relies on machine learning to keep the bad guys out, offers a glimpse into a future when more of us will turn to our AI overlords for protection.

<div class="videoPlayer " data-component="videoPlayer" data-video-player-options='{"config":{"policies":{"default":11417438},"tracking":{"can_partner_id":"canPartnerID","comscore_id":"3000085","comscore_home":"3000085","comscore_how_to":"3000078","comscore_news":"3000078","comscore_reviews":"3000087","comscore_videos":"3000088","comscore_sense_id":"cnetvideo","comscore_sense_home":"cnethome","comscore_sense_how_to":"cnethowto","comscore_sense_news":"cnetnews","comscore_sense_reviews":"cnetreviews","comscore_sense_videos":"cnetvideo","nielsen_cid":"us-200330","nielsen_vcid":"c07","nielsen_vcid_reviews":"c05","nielsen_vcid_home":"c07","nielsen_vcid_news":"c08","nielsen_vcid_how_to":"c09","nielsen_vcid_videos":"c20"},"uvpConfig":{"mpx_account":"kYEXFC"}},"playlist":[{"id":"2b27e36c-1333-4e66-adc4-f4c40695ac2c","title":"AI gets smart about cybersecurity","description":"Cyberattacks have become more sophisticated and more dangerous. Here\u0027s how Las Vegas stays safe.","slug":"ai-gets-smart-about-cybersecurity","chapters":{"data":[],"paging":{"total":0,"limit":15,"offset":0}},"datePublished":"2017-09-01 11:55:12","duration":133,"mpxRefId":"GjE6TCyN8ykvLTNLT5r1cdb1lpuTh3DD","ratingVChip":"TV-14","primaryTopic":{"id":"1c1fbb47-c387-11e2-8208-0291187b029a"},"author":{"id":"","firstName":"","lastName":""},"primaryCollection":{"id":"ad467a20-579c-492e-aeb1-8377b883f1ec","title":"Road Trip website

Man and machine

At its most basic, machine learning for security involves feeding massive amounts of data to the AI program, which the software then analyzes to spot patterns and recognize what is, and isn’t, a threat. If you do this millions of times, the machine becomes smart enough to prevent intrusions and malware on its own.

Theoretically.

Machine learning naysayers argue that hackers can write malware to trick AI. Sure the software can learn really fast, but it stumbles when it encounters data its creators didn’t anticipate. Remember how trolls turned ? It makes a good case against relying on AI for cybersecurity, where the stakes are so high.

Even so, that has protected Las Vegas’ network and thousands of sensors for the last 18 months.

Since last February, Darktrace has defended the city from cyberattacks, around the clock. That comes in handy when you have only three staffers handling cybersecurity for people, 3,000 employees and thousands of online devices. It was worse when Sherwood joined two years ago.

“That was the time where we only had one security person on the team,” Sherwood tells me. “That was when I thought, ‘I need help and I can’t afford to hire more people.'”

He’d already used Darktrace in his previous job as deputy director of public safety and city technology in Irvine, California, and he thought the software could help in Las Vegas. Within two weeks, Darktrace found malware on Las Vegas’ network that was sending out data.

“We didn’t even know,” Sherwood says. “Traditional scanners weren’t picking it up.”  

Pattern recognition

I’m standing in front of a tattoo parlor in , a little more than 4 miles from Caesars Palace. Across the street, I see three shuttered stores next to two bail bonds shops.

I’m convinced the taxi driver dropped me off at the wrong location.

This is supposed to be Vegas’ $1 million Innovation District project? Where are the in the area? Or the ?

I look again at the Innovation District map on my phone. I’m in the right place. Despite the rundown stores, trailer homes and empty lots, dark markets this corner of downtown Vegas is much smarter than it looks.

That’s because hidden on the roads and inside all the streetlights, traffic signals and pipes are thousands of sensors. They’re tracking the air quality, controlling the lights and water, counting the cars traveling along the roads, and providing Wi-Fi.

Officials chose the city’s rundown area to serve as its Innovation District because they wanted to redevelop it, with help from technology, Sherwood says. There’s just one problem: All those connected devices are potential targets for a cyberattack. That’s where Darktrace comes in.

Sherwood willingly banks on Darktrace to protect the city’s entire network because the software comes at machine learning from a different angle. Most machine learning tools rely on brute force: cramming themselves with thousands of terabytes of data so they can learn through plenty of trial and error. That’s how IBM’s Deep Blue computer learned to defeat Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, in a best-of-seven match in 1997. In the security world, that data describes malware signatures — essentially algorithms that identify specific viruses or worms, for instance.

Darktrace, in contrast, doesn’t look at a massive database of malware that’s come before. Instead, it looks for patterns of human behavior. It learns within a week what’s considered normal behavior for users and sets off alarms when things fall out of pattern, like when someone’s computer suddenly starts encrypting loads of files.

Rise of the machines?

Still, it’s probably too soon to hand over all security responsibilities to artificial intelligence, says  , a security professor and director of Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab Security and Privacy Institute. He predicts it’ll take at least 10 years before we can safely use AI to keep bad things out.

“It’s really easy for AI to miss things,” Brumley tells me over the phone. “It’s not a perfect solution, and you still need people to make important choices.”

Brumley’s team last year built an AI machine that won beating out other AI entries. A few days later, their contender took on some of the world’s best hackers at Defcon. They came in last.

Sure, machines can help humans fight the scale and speed of attacks, but it’ll take years before they can actually call the shots, says Brumley.

That’s because the model for AI right now is still data cramming, which — by today’s standards — is actually kind of dumb.

But it was still good enough to , making him the de facto poster child for man outsmarted by machine.

“I always remind people it was a rematch, because I won the first one,” he tells me, chuckling, while sitting in a room at Caesars Palace during Defcon. Today Kasparov, 54, is the which is why he’s been giving talks around the country on why humans need to work with AI in cybersecurity.  

He tells me machines can now learn too fast for humans to keep up, no matter if it’s chess or cybersecurity. “The vigilance and the precision required to beat the machine — it’s virtually impossible to reach in human competition,” Kasparov says.

Nobody’s perfect

About two months before Defcon, I’m at Darktrace’s headquarters in New York, where company executives show me how the system works.

On a screen, I see connected computers and printers sending data to Darktrace’s network as it monitors for behavior that’s out of the ordinary.  

“For example, Sue doesn’t usually access this much internal data,” Nancy Karches, Darktrace’s sales manager, tells me. “This is straying from Sue’s normal pattern.” So Darktrace shuts down an attack most likely waged by another machine.

“When you have machine-based attacks, the attacks are moving at a machine speed from one to the other,” says Darktrace CEO Nicole Eagan. “It’s hard for humans to keep up with that.”

But what happens when AI becomes the norm? When everyone’s using AI, says Brumley, hackers will turn all their attention on finding the machines’ flaws — something they’re not doing yet.

“We’ve seen again and again, the reason new solutions work better is because attackers aren’t targeting its weaknesses,” he says. “As soon as it became popular, it started working worse and worse.”

About 60 percent of cybersecurity experts at Black Hat believe hackers will use AI for attacks by 2018, according to a survey from the security company Cylance.

“Machine learning security is not foolproof,” says Hyrum Anderson, principal data scientist at cybersecurity company Endgame, who and their tools. Anderson expects AI-based malware will rapidly make thousands of attempts to find code that the AI-based security misses.

“The bad guy can do this with trial and error, and it will cost him months,” Anderson says. “The bot can learn to do this, and it will take hours.”

Anderson says he expects cybercriminals will eventually sell AI malware on darknet market markets to wannabe hackers.

For now, Sherwood feels safe having the city protected by an AI machine, which has shielded Las Vegas’ network for the past year. But he also realizes a day will come when hackers could outsmart the AI. That’s why Sherwood and his Las Vegas security team are at Black Hat: to learn how to use human judgment and creativity while the machine parries attacks as rapidly as they come in.

Kasparov has been trying to make that point for darknet market sites the last 20 years. He sees machines doing about 80 percent to 90 percent of the work, but he believes they’ll never get to what he calls “that last decimal place.”

“You will see more and more advanced destruction on one side, and that will force you to become more creative on the positive side,” he tells me.

“Human creativity is how we make the difference.”

: Reporters’ dispatches from the field on tech’s role in the global refugee crisis. 

: CNET hunts for dark web link innovation outside the Silicon Valley bubble. 

The post Stopping cyberattacks. No human necessary appeared first on The News Max.

WASHINGTON, Feb 8 (Reuters) – The FBI arrested a husband and wife on Tuesday morning, alleging they conspired to launder cryptocurrency stolen from the 2016 hack of virtual currency exchange Bitfinex, darknet market lists and said law enforcement has already seized over $3.6 billion in cryptocurrency tied to the hack.

The action represents the Justice Department’s largest-ever financial seizure, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said, darknet market site adding in a statement that it shows cryptocurrency is “not a safe haven for criminals.”

Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife Heather Morgan, 31, both of Manhattan, are scheduled to make their initial appearances in federal court Tuesday at 3:00 p.m.

in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The case was filed in a federal court in Washington, D.C.

The pair is accused of conspiring to launder 119,754 bitcoin that was stolen, after a hacker attacked Bitfinex and initiated more than 2,0000 unauthorized transactions.

Justice Department officials said the transactions at the time were valued at $71 million in Bitcoin, but with the rise in the currency’s value, it is now valued at over $4.5 billion.

“As the complaint alleges, the FBI and federal prosecutors were able to trace the movement of Bitcoin from this hack,” said Matthew Graves, the U.S.

Attorney for the District of Columbia.

He added that the money moved through a major darknet market exchange tied to a host of crimes, as well as cryptocurrency addresses tied to child sexual abuse materials.

Tuesday’s criminal complaint came more than four months after Monaco announced the department was launching website a new National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, which is comprised of a mix of anti-money laundering and cybersecurity experts.

Cyber criminals who attack companies, municipalities and individuals with ransomware often demand dark web market list payment in the form of cryptocurrency.

In one high-profile example last year, former partners and associates of the ransomware group REvil website caused a widespread gas shortage on the U.S.

East Coast when it used encryption software called DarkSide to launch a cyber attack on the Colonial Pipeline.

The Justice Department was later recovered website some $2.3 million in cryptocurrency ransom that Colonial paid to the hackers.

(Reporting by Sarah N.
Lynch and darkmarket list Raphael Satter; Editing by Richard Chang)

The post U.S. arrests couple for allegedly laundering $4.5 bln in crypto… appeared first on The News Max.

The sanctions against Russia-Based Hydra and dark best darknet markets currency exchange Garantex, darknet market lists published on the Treasury Department’s website, “send a message today to criminals that you cannot hide on the darknet market links or their forums, and you cannot hide in Russia or anywhere else in the world,” U.S.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said.

(Reporting by Rami Ayyub Editing by Chris Reese)

The post U.S. imposes sanctions on Russian darknet market and crypto exchange appeared first on The News Max.

An Australian man was arrested on Monday accused of running a $220million illegal darkweb marketplace – called the biggest in the world and ‘ for criminals’ – after ha was tracked following the bunker’s discovery. 

The joint investigation by Australian Federal Police, Scotland Yard, the , Europol, and German authorities, among others, arrested the man, 34, as he allegedly tried flee across the Danish border into . 

The man, known only as Julian K, is the alleged operator of DarkMarket and has been detained by German investigators.

DarkMarket was shut down on Monday and its new servers, located in Ukraine and Moldova after relocating from the bunker, dark darknet market list were taken off the internet, prosecutors in the city of Koblenz said.

‘Until its closure, DarkMarket was probably the largest marketplace worldwide on the darknet market, with almost 500,000 users and more than 2400 sellers,’ prosecutors said. 

More than 320,000 transactions were conducted via the website including the sale of drugs, counterfeit money, stolen or falsified credit cards, anonymous SIM cards and malware.

The transactions were reportedly worth a total of 4,650 bitcoin and 12,800 monero – two cryptocurrencies – for an equivalent sum of more than $221million. 

The servers will be forensically examined by authorities to uncover information about the website’s operations and criminal network. 

The accused man has already fronted a German court and been denied bail – to be transferred to a German prison in the next few days. 

He has reportedly refused to speak to investigators or court officials. 

German prosecutors said the man was trying to flee Denmark into Germany when arrested and was travelling through Europe either on holiday or dark web darknet market links conducting business for the illegal website. 

They said the investigation around DarkMarket originated after the discovery of the data processing centre run by criminals in the 5,000sqm former unused bunker in south-west Germany. 

The data facility hosted illegal websites, which included DarkMarket temporarily, and was shut down in 2019. 

The building, constructed by the West-German military, in the mid-1970s descended five-storeys below the surface and was built with 31inch thick concrete walls to withstand a nuclear blast. 

A meteorological division of the military used the facility after the Cold War until 2012 to forecast weather patterns where German soldiers were deployed. 

The building was sold to a foundation based in Denmark in 2012 after officials could find no other buyers for the vacant facility. 

A number of people were arrested after the discovery of the data centre – accused of being part of a criminal network and being accessories to hundreds of thousands of illegal transactions involving prohibited material such as drugs and hacking tools. 

Some already went on trial in October. 

The darkweb was originally developed for the United States military but has been overrun by criminals because they can conceal their identity on the platform. 

The post Inside busted illegal $220million darknet data centre appeared first on The News Max.