skyewerner7, Author at The News Max

The largest dark web market for illegal goods is no more

skyewerner7 — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 23:04:13 +0000

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Two of the three largest dark web markets are closed for business.

The Department of Justice and Europol announced Thursday that they have that served hundreds of thousands of customers trying to get their hands on illegal goods online.

While you or I can easily buy groceries, electronics and clothes online, when it comes to finding drugs, weapons and stolen identities, things can get a little more complicated. Merchants of contraband hide out on the dark web, . There, buyers and sellers are anonymous, and so is the currency, with most transactions happening through bitcoin.

AlphaBay alone had 200,000 customers and more than 40,000 sellers peddling illegal goods, making it the largest takedown for darkmarket 2024 a dark web marketplace ever. The website had 100,000 listings for sale when the governments took it down. In comparison, , had 14,000 listings when the FBI shut down the site four years ago. Hansa was the third largest dark web darknet market when it shut down.

“I believe that because of this operation, the American people are safer from the threat of identity fraud and malware, and safer from deadly drugs,” attorney general Jeff Sessions said at a press conference Thursday. He called the bust one of the “most important criminal cases” of the year.

The website made $1 billion in sales before it was shut down in a joint operation of the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, Dutch police and Europol.

“They coordinated a takedown and have punched a big hole in the operating ability of drug traffickers and other serious criminals around the world,” Europol director Rob Wainwright said.

Visitors first noticed AlphaBay was down on July 5, when Alexandre Cazes, better known as Alpha02, the website’s creator and admin, was arrested in Thailand. On July 12, darkmarket list he was found dead while in custody there, in an apparent suicide. Frequent AlphaBay users were concerned that the shutdown was an “exit scam,” in which a darknet market owner takes the money and runs.

“The operation at AlphaBay was well run and sophisticated, and it struck me as highly unlikely that the darknet market would go down as an exit scam with anything other than calculated precision,” Emily Wilson, the director of analysis at Terbium Labs said, in an email.

Terbium Labs had been following the dark web for months, specifically in marketplaces like AlphaBay. After the fallout in early July, Wilson said former moderators and well-known users were left in confusion.

After AlphaBay’s shutdown, its users flocked to Hansa, increasing the dark market‘s traffic in eightfold, Wainwright said. Dutch police took over Hansa last month and have been collecting thousands of user’s information in an undercover operation.

Wainwright said officers are tracking down Hansa buyers and sellers through their usernames and passwords.

But that’s just one chapter in the fight against illegal online transactions. Just as AlphaBay rose and became 10 times larger than , FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe predicts there will be another dark web market to fill the void.

“There are some criminals that think of cybercrime as a freebie,” McCabe said. “They think they will get away with it because there are too many players and too many countries, they think they will get away with it because the schemes are too complex and because they operate in the shadows.”

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German investigators shut down big darknet marketplace

skyewerner7 — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 21:04:13 +0000

BERLIN (AP) – German prosecutors said Tuesday that they have taken down what they believe was the biggest illegal marketplace on the darknet market and darkmarket arrested its suspected operator.

The site, known as DarkMarket, was shut down on Monday, prosecutors in the southwestern city of Koblenz said.
All sorts of drugs, forged money, stolen or forged credit cards, anonymous mobile phone SIM cards and malware were among the things offered for sale there, darknet market magazine they added.

German investigators were assisted in their months-long probe by U.S. authorities and by Australian, British, Danish, Swiss, Ukrainian and dark websites web darknet market Moldovan police.

The marketplace had nearly 500,000 users and more than 2,400 vendors, prosecutors said.

They added that it processed more than 320,000 transactions, and Bitcoin and Monero cryptocurrency to the value of more than 140 million euros ($170 million) were exchanged.

The darknet markets Onion is a part of the web accessible only with specialized identity-cloaking tools.

The suspected operator, a 34-year-old Australian man, was arrested near the German-Danish border.

Prosecutors said a judge has ordered him held in custody pending possible formal charges, and he hasn’t given any information to investigators.

More than 20 servers in Moldova and Ukraine were seized, German prosecutors said. They hope to find information on those servers about other participants in the marketplace.

Prosecutors said the move against DarkMarket originated in an investigation of a data processing center installed in a former NATO bunker in southwestern Germany that hosted sites dealing in drugs and other illegal activities.

It was shut down in 2019.

That center hosted DarkMarket at one point.

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Cybercrooks steal code for Electronic Arts games including FIFA 21

skyewerner7 — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 18:04:07 +0000

Hackers have stolen the source code for Electronic Arts (EA) games including and tools like the ‘Frostbite’ engine that powers titles such as the ‘Battlefield’ series.

The California-based video game company acknowledged the cybercrime on Thursday June 10,

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EA also said that it was ‘actively working with law enforcement officials and other experts as part of [an] ongoing criminal investigation.’

According to Vice, hackers have been boasting online about the attack via underground internet forums, with one post saying they ‘have full capability of exploiting on all EA services.’

Furthermore, they reported, the hackers have been advertising the stolen software for sale across various dark web forums.

A spokesperson for EA has said that the attackers did not access any private player data and that the breach is unlikely to affect their business operations.

Pictured: a screenshot from EA’s upcoming ‘Battlefield 2042’ game, powered by the Frostbite engine whose code was stolen

‘Anytime source code gets leaked, it’s not good,’ said cloud security architect Stuart Green of Isreal-based Check Point Software.

‘With such precious information in their hands, dark web market links hackers can easily see the inner workings of a game, darknet market list exploit security gaps and darknet magazine even reverse-engineer games for malicious purposes,’ he continued.

‘These malicious activities can scale if hackers proceed to sell their theft.’

‘Reports are out that the source code in the EA Games data leak is already being advertised on the darknet markets onion address, dark darknet market 2024 which is not surprising as hackers are usually quick to monetise what they steal.’

‘Selling such proprietary information, like source code from EA Games, can net someone big money on the darknet market.’

Among the files stolen was part of the source code for the Frostbite game engine which powers many EA titles, including the ‘Battlefield’ series.

Pictured: Game enthusiasts and dark websites industry personnel watch scenes from ‘Battlefield One’ during the Electronic Arts EA Play event on June 10, 2017 in Los Angeles, California

The news follows a wave of high-profile cyberattacks in recent months.

These have included several ransomware attacks on industrial firms and health care facilities — as well as and breaches of government and tor drug market non-profit networks which experts have attributed to espionage efforts.

The attack on EA comes as major video game makers are on the brink of participating in the annual , which is running from June 12-15 this year and is being held virtually due to the pandemic.

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U.S. imposes sanctions on Russian darknet market and crypto exchange

skyewerner7 — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 16:04:06 +0000

WASHINGTON, dark darknet market April 5 (Reuters) – The U.S.
Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Tuesday on a Russia-based darknet market site and dark web sites a cryptocurrency exchange that it said operates primarily out of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The sanctions against Russia-Based Hydra and dark markets currency exchange Garantex, darknet market websites published on the Treasury Department’s website, “send a message today to criminals that you cannot hide on the darknet market 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)

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Fake vaccine card price doubles after Biden announces mandatory shots

skyewerner7 — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 14:04:16 +0000

The price of fake vaccination cards has risen 100% since President Biden’s announcement of a sweeping new vaccine mandate.

In the days before the president’s announcement that all businesses with over 100 employees must require vaccinations or weekly testing, the cost of a fraudulent card ran about $100. The day after the announcement, the average cost spiked to $200.

The number of sellers cashing in on the anti-vax darknet market also spiked, from around 1,000 to more than 10,000, according to data from security firm Check Point shared with the

Biden last Thursday also strengthened a vaccine mandate for federal workers and contractors, requiring them to be vaccinated and eliminating the weekly testing alternative.

The number of subscribers in Telegram groups for fake vaccine cards increased five-fold, according to researchers at Check Point who monitor the darknet market and deep web.

Counterfeit cards have for months popped up on Amazon, Etsy, eBay, Facebook, Instagram and other marketplaces.

In April, a bipartisan coalition of 47 state attorneys general sent a letter to the CEOs of Twitter, Shopify and eBay to take down ads or links selling the bogus cards.

Many of the sites have blacklisted keywords related to fake cards, but places to buy the documents are still popping up on messaging apps, chat forums and the dark web link web.

In July, the Department of Justice announced its first prosecution for fake vaccination proof, where a California naturopathic doctor, Juli Mazi, was charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of false statements related to health care matters.

Biden last Thursday signed an executive order forcing businesses with over 100 employees to require vaccinations or weekly Covid-19 testing

A photo of a hand darknet site using a magnifying glass to check the authenticity of s Covid-19 vaccine card, taken on August 15

Thousands of counterfeit vaccination cards, dark markets 2024 containing typos and misspelled words, have been seized in Memphis

And dark market 2024 web link on Aug. 17, a Chicago pharmacist, TangTang Zao, was arrested for selling dozens of fake vaccine cards for just $10 a pop.

‘To put such a small price on the safety of our nation is not only an insult to those who are doing their part in the fight to stop COVID-19, but a federal crime with serious consequences,’ said Special Agent in Charge Emmerson Buie Jr. of the FBI’s Chicago Field Office.

Zao allegedly sold blank but authentic CDC vaccination cards and was charged with 12 counts of theft of government property. If convicted, he faces a sentence of 10 years in prison per count.

On Aug. 31, a New Jersey woman, Jasmine Clifford, who went by @antivaxmomma on Instagram, was charged along with 14 others as part of a scheme that peddled over 250 fake vaccination cards for $200 on Instagram. For an extra $250, co-conspirator Nadayza Barkley, who worked at a New York medical clinic, would allegedly enter the buyer’s name into the state’s digital database for New York’s digital vaccine pass.

Three Vermont state troopers, who have since resigned, are also under FBI investigation for running a fake vaccination card scheme.

Customs and Border Protection says it has seized thousands of fake vaccination cards coming into the US over the past few months.

Last month the agency uncovered a shipment from Shenzen, China to Memphis containing fake vaccine cards fraught with typos and misspelled words. CBP said it was the 15th such shipment of the night, though to all different cities, and none were even concealed inside their shipment container. CBP said Memphis alone had made 121 seizures totaling 3,017 of vaccination cards.

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Gab, the social network used by Pittsburgh shooting suspect, returns

skyewerner7 — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 12:04:15 +0000

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, darknet markets url a fringe social network , resurfaced on Sunday.

The social media site, which Dark Markets itself as a bastion of free speech amid censorship of extremists on Twitter and Facebook, was intermittently available late Sunday. Clicking on links to the site sometimes would produce error darkmarket 2024 messages, but that didn’t seem to stop some of the site’s 800,000 users from posting celebratory messages, praising the company for coming back online. Many of them hailed the move as for .

“Through the grace of God Gab is back online,” Gab CEO Andrew Torba . “We will never give in. Free speech and liberty will always win.”

Gab’s return marks the latest turn in the unfolding debate over free speech in the modern age. Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube have on bad behavior and hate speech on their services. That’s driven some of the people banned from those sites to sites like and Gab, a Twitter-like alternative social network founded in 2016.

Last week, Gab came under scrutiny when reports surfaced that Robert Bowers, who is charged with opening fire in , used the social network to voice . Eleven people died .

Two days later, on Oct. 29, domain provider GoDaddy . GoDaddy said it made the decision after receiving complaints and finding content on Gab that “promotes and encourages violence against people.” , Stripe, Joyent, Shopify and Medium also cut ties with Gab.

Gab isn’t the only social network that’s been used by extremists. Facebook, Twitter and dark web market links YouTube all have been used by terrorists and Neo-Nazis, as well. With varying degrees of success, those platforms have tried to crack down on hate speech. Gab, however, markets itself as a bastion of free speech that is more permissive than other sites, darkmarkets which is part of why it’s attracted extremists.

Gab also isn’t the first site to see its domain register or host pull their services because of its content. Last year, the neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer after being booted by GoDaddy and Google. Gab, for its part, is operating on the surface dark web marketplaces for now.

In a , Torba said Gab was able to come back online after , , and should be fully back online Monday. “This coordinate smear by the mainstream media did not work,” he said in the message. “This smear is only going to propel us into the stratosphere.”

: Everything you need to know about the free speech debate.

: Everything you need to know about why tech is under Washington’s microscope.

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U.S. arrests alleged 'Bitcoin Fog' money launderer

skyewerner7 — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 10:04:38 +0000

By Lawrence Delevingne

BOSTON, April 28 (Reuters) – U.S.
officials on Tuesday arrested Roman Sterlingov, the alleged principal operator of cryptocurrency money laundering website Bitcoin Fog, darkmarket list according to a federal court filing.

Sterlingov, dark websites a citizen of Russia and Sweden, darknet market site was detained in Los Angeles on money-laundering related charges.

Bitcoin Fog, launched in 2011, is one of the original Bitcoin “tumbler” or “mixer” services designed to help users anonymize cryptocurrencies payments, especially on so-called darknet market online markets that trafficked in drugs and other illegal products, according to a legal statement accompanying the criminal complaint by Internal Revenue Service special agent Devon Beckett.

“Analysis of bitcoin transactions, financial records, Internet service provider records, email records and additional investigative information, identifies Roman Sterlingov as the principal operator of Bitcoin Fog,” Beckett wrote.

More than 1.2 million Bitcoin (BTC) — worth approximately $336 million at the time of the transactions — were sent through Bitcoin Fog, according to the Beckett statement.

A spokesperson for darkmarket 2024 the U.S.

Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, which is handling the case, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Requests sent to email addresses tied to Sterlingov were not immediately returned. (Reporting by Lawrence Delevingne; Editing by Aurora Ellis)

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Stopping cyberattacks. No human necessary

skyewerner7 — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 08:04:08 +0000

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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.

Aaron Robinson/CNET

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, darkmarkets 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 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 dark market list web darknet market protection.

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 darkmarket 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.'”

It’s really easy for AI to miss things.

David Brumley, Carnegie Mellon University

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, darknet marketplace trailer homes and empty lots, 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.

Aaron Robinson/CNET

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.”

Aaron Robinson/CNET

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 Dark Market Link 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.

Garry Kasparov addresses the Defcon crowd at this year’s conference.

Avast

“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.

Darktrace

“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.

to see more Road Trip adventures.

Bettmann/Contributor

“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 dark 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 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.”

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Self-proclaimed 'Crocodile of Wall Street' and husband granted bail

skyewerner7 — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 06:04:05 +0000

The self-proclaimed ‘Crocodile of Wall Street’ and her husband have been granted bail set at $3million and $5million respectively after being arrested for allegedly laundering $4.5billion in stolen in the 2016 Bitfinex exchange hack.

Ilya ” Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife, dark market onion Heather Rhiannon Morgan, 31, who raps under the name Razzlekhan, were arrested on Tuesday in Manhattan on federal charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to defraud the United States.

At an initial court appearance, a magistrate judge ruled Lichtenstein could be released into home detention on a $5 million bond co-signed by his parents; the bond amount for Morgan was set at $3 million but they were to remain in custody until the bail conditions were met.

Prosecutors had argued defendants, who live on Wall Street in lower Manhattan, should be denied bail, calling them flight risks who still potentially have access to vast sums of money.

Federal law enforcement officials said they recovered roughly $3.6 billon in cryptocurrency – the Justice Department’s largest ever financial seizure – linked to the hack of Bitfinex, a virtual currency exchange whose systems were breached nearly six years ago.

Lichtenstein is a citizen of both  and the United States and the co-founder of an online marketing firm. Morgan, a rapper and former Forbes contributor, describes herself as ‘an expert in persuasion, social engineering, and game theory’.

WARNING: EXPLICIT LYRICS

Bail for Ilya ‘Dutch’ Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife, Heather Rhiannon Morgan, 31, was set at $5million and darknet Markets onion Address $3million respectively after their arrest on Tuesday for allegedly laundering $4.5billion in Bitcoin stolen in the 2016 Bitfinex exchange hack

Morgan, who raps under the name Razzlekhan, (seen in front of Federal Hall on Wall Street in a music video) declared herself the ‘Crocodile of Wall Street’ in one of her rap songs

In this courtroom sketch, attorney Sam Enzer, center, dark market web darknet market list sits between Heather Morgan, left, and her husband, Ilya ‘Dutch’ Lichtenstein, dark market url in federal court on Tuesday

‘I’m many things, a rapper, an economist, a journalist, a writer, a CEO, and a dirty, dirty, dirty dirty h*,’ she raps in her 2019 single, Versace Bedouin.

‘When she’s not reverse-engineering black markets to think of better ways to combat fraud and cybercrime, she enjoys rapping and designing streetwear fashion,’ her reads.

The August 2016 Bitfinex hack itself was one of the largest crypto heists ever recorded – so massive that news of the theft knocked 20 percent off Bitcoin’s value at the time.

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Lichtenstein and Morgan are thus far not charged directly with perpetrating the hack, but rather with receiving and laundering the stolen funds. The case was filed in a federal court in Washington, D.C.

It was unclear who will be representing the couple in the criminal case and whether they had an attorney to speak on their behalf.

They were due to appear in federal court in Manhattan at 3 p.m. on Tuesday.

The couple is accused of conspiring to launder 119,754 bitcoin that was stolen, after a hacker attacked Bitfinex and initiated more than 2,000 unauthorized transactions.

Morgan, a rapper and former Forbes contributor, describes herself as ‘an expert in persuasion, social engineering, and game theory’

The couple is accused of conspiring to launder 119,754 bitcoin that was stolen, after a hacker attacked Bitfinex and initiated more than 2,000 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.

Lichtenstein and Morgan are facing charges of conspiring to commit money laundering, as well as to defraud the United States.

Prosecutors said on Tuesday the illegal proceeds were spent on a variety of things, from gold and non-fungible tokens to ‘absolutely mundane things such as purchasing a Walmart gift card for $500.’

Bitfinex said in a statement that it was to working with the Department of Justice to ‘establish our rights to a return of the stolen bitcoin.’

‘We have been cooperating extensively with the DOJ since its investigation began and will continue to do so,’ the company said.

Bitfinex said it intends to provide further updates on its efforts to obtain a return of the stolen bitcoin as and when those updates are available.

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

The August 2016 Bitfinex hack itself was one of the largest crypto heists ever recorded – so massive that news of the theft knocked 20 percent off Bitcoin’s value

Lichtenstein and Morgan are facing charges of conspiring to commit money laundering, as well as to defraud the United States

Morgan is seen rapping with the New York Stock Exchange behind her to the right

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

In one high-profile example last year, hackers caused a widespread gas shortage on the U.S. East Coast when by using encryption software called DarkSide to launch a cyber attack on the Colonial Pipeline.

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

Cases like these demonstrate that the Justice Department ‘can follow money across the blockchain, just as we have always followed it within the traditional financial system,’ said Kenneth Polite, assistant attorney general of the department’s Criminal Division.

Justice Department officials say that though the proliferation of cryptocurrency and virtual currency exchanges represent innovation, the trend has also been accompanied by money laundering, ransomware and other crimes

‘Today´s arrests, and the Department´s largest financial seizure ever, show that cryptocurrency is not a safe haven for criminals,’ Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement.

‘In a futile effort to maintain digital anonymity, the defendants laundered stolen funds through a labyrinth of cryptocurrency transactions. Thanks to the meticulous work of law enforcement, the department once again showed how it can and will follow the money, no matter the form it takes.’

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One of the biggest ever dark web police stings leads to 150 arrests

skyewerner7 — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 04:04:16 +0000

Police around the world have arrested 150 suspects in one of the largest-ever dark web sting operations.

The suspects arrested included several high-profile targets, involved in buying or dark web darknet market selling illegal goods online, Europol said today.

Operation Dark HunTOR also recovered millions of pounds in cash and , as well as drugs and guns.

The bust stems from a German-led police sting earlier this year taking down the ‘world’s largest’ darknet markets links marketplace.

darknet market markets are e-commerce sites designed to lie beyond the reach of regular search engines and are popular with criminals, as buyers and sellers are largely untraceable.

Police around the world have arrested 150 suspects in one of the largest-ever dark web sting operations.

The suspects arrested included several high-profile targets, involved in buying or selling illegal goods online, Europol said today (stock image)

Dark HunTOR, dark darknet market url ‘was composed of a series of separate but complementary actions in Australia, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States,’ the Hague-based Europol said.

In the United States alone, police arrested 65 people, while 47 were held in Germany, 24 in Britain, and four each in Italy and the Netherlands, among others.

A number of those arrested ‘were considered high-value targets’ by Europol.

Law agents also confiscated 26.7 million euros (£22.45million) in cash and virtual currencies, as well as 45 guns and 516lbs of drugs, including 25,000 ecstasy pills.

Italian police also shut down the ‘DeepSea’ and ‘Berlusconi’ marketplaces, ‘which together boasted over 100,000 announcements of illegal products’, said Europol, which coordinated the operation together with its twin judicial agency Eurojust.

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German police in January closed down the ‘DarkMarket’ online marketplace, used by its alleged operator, an Australian, to facilitate the sale of drugs, stolen credit card data and malware.

Europol said the arrest of the alleged operator, caught near the German-Danish border at the time, and the seizure of the criminal infrastructure provided ‘investigators across the world with a trove of evidence’.

German prosecutors at the time said DarkMarket came to light in the course of a major investigation against the web-hosting service Cyberbunker, located in a former NATO bunker in southwest Germany.

Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre EC3 has since been compiling intelligence packages to identify the key targets, the continent’s policing agency said.

The secret ‘darknet market‘ includes websites that can be assessed only with specific software or authorisations, ensuring anonymity for users.

Dark HunTOR, ‘was composed of a series of separate but complementary actions in Australia, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States,’ the Hague-based Europol (their HQ pictured) said

They have faced increased pressure from international law enforcement in recent months.

‘The point of operations such as this is to put criminals operating on the dark web on notice (that) the law enforcement community has the means and global partnerships to unmask them and hold them accountable for their illegal activities,’ Europol deputy director of operations Jean-Philippe Lecouffe said.

Rolf van Wegberg, cybercrime investigator at the TU Delft university said the operation signalled a break in the trend of recent police actions against suspected online criminals.

‘This kind of operations in the past looked at arresting the controllers of these marketplaces, we now see police services targeting the top sellers,’ he told investigative journalists at the Dutch KRO-NCRV public broadcaster.

A press conference about the operation has been set for 10am local time (2pm GMT) in Washington with the Department of Justice.

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