Cash and cryptocurrency worth 26.7 million euros ($31 million) and 234 kilograms of drugs were also seized, according to Dutch broadcaster KRO-NRCV.

“This operation proves that we can reach (criminals on the dark market list web) even if they think they are hiding somewhere, they cannot be sure we won’t be there at one moment to knock on their door”, Europol’s deputy executive director of operations, Jean-Philippe Lecouffe told the broadcaster.

Europol would not comment on the report, but referred to a press conference set for 10AM local time (1400 GMT) in Washington with the Department of Justice.

According to the Dutch media 65 U.S.

nationals were arrested, along with 47 Germans, 24 Brits and a handful of Dutch, darknet market markets onion address French, Swiss and Bulgarian nationals.

The operation focused on sellers and buyers on the darknet rather than the people running the sites as in earlier crackdowns.

darknet market markets are e-commerce sites designed to lie beyond the reach of regular search engines.

They are popular with criminals, as buyers and dark market list sellers are largely untraceable.

In January this year, Europol announced it had taken down an online marketplace called “DarkMarket” that sold illegal drugs in an operation led by German law enforcement agencies.

($1 = 0.8593 euros)

(Reporting by Stephanie van den Berg, editing by Bart Meijer and Christina Fincher)

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Thousands of diagnostic appointments, cancer treatment clinics and surgeries have been canceled or delayed since a ransomware attack on Friday.
Authorities said hundreds of people have been deployed to tackle the attack, but it could be weeks before the health service can return to normal.

Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin said Tuesday that the attack was a “heinous” one that targeted patients and “the Irish public.” Health Service Executive chief clinical officer Colm Henry said the attack had had “a profound impact on our ability to deliver care,” and that the disruptions would undoubtedly “mount in the coming days and weeks.”

More than 2,000 patient-facing IT systems are affected, with around 80,000 devices linked to such systems throughout the health service, Henry told Irish broadcaster RTE.

Authorities are prioritizing systems involving direct patient care diagnostics, such as radiology, radiotherapy and maternity and newborn services.

“That´s what our experts are focusing on this week, with external help, to ensure those services are not reliant on manual exchange of information,” he said.

Ransomware attacks are typically carried out by criminal hackers who scramble data, darknet market paralyzing victims´ networks, and demand a large payment to decrypt it.

Irish officials say a ransom has been demanded but they will not pay it.

Conti, darkmarkets a Russian-speaking ransomware group, was demanding $20 million, according to the ransom negotiation page on its darknet markets links site viewed by The Associated Press. The gang threatened Monday to “start publishing and selling your private information very soon” if the money was not paid.

“The government will not be paying any money,” Justice Minister Heather Humphreys told RTE.

“We will not be blackmailed.”

The Irish Association for Emergency Medicine urged people not to turn up at hospitals’ emergency departments unless they have a genuinely urgent need to do so. It said that electronic ordering of blood tests, X-rays and darkmarket list scans is not available, and clinicians have no access to previous X-rays or scan results.
Many hospitals’ telephone systems are also not functioning because they are carried on computer networks, it added.

Patients have described their frustration about the attack, describing it as another torment thrown into the already difficult struggle to face illness during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Eimear Cregg, 38, a primary school teacher who is fighting breast cancer, had radiation therapy briefly postponed while doctors sought to restore her records so they could treat her properly.

“This is a very cruel thing to do to vulnerable people,´´ she told The Associated Press. “We´re fighting every day as it is and this was just another curve ball that wasn´t needed.´´

The Health Service Executive said in a statement late Monday that there were “serious concerns about the implications for patient care arising from the very limited access to diagnostics, lab services and historical patient records.”

The attack has also shut down the system used to pay health care workers.

The health service said it was working methodically to assess and restore its computer systems.

“Our priority is keeping our patients safe and maintaining essential care and support services,” it said.

Ransomware attacks are an increasing problem for private companies and public bodies around the world.

T he Thai affiliate of Paris-based insurance company AXA and darknet markets 2024 a public health provider in New Zealand were both dealing with ransomware attacks on Tuesday.

In the U.S., the nation´s largest fuel pipeline was hit with a ransomware attack earlier this month.

The disruption of the Colonial Pipeline caused long lines at gas stations due to distribution problems and panic-buying, draining supplies at thousands of gas stations.

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The site, darknet market darknet markets onion address 2024 known as BOYSTOWN and accessible only via the so-called Darkweb, had existed since July 2019 and was used for the worldwide exchange of child porn.

Investigators spent months probing the site and darknet marketplace those behind it, darkmarket 2024 before arresting three main suspects along with a fourth man in raids last month.

Officers say the main suspects are a 40-year-old from Paderborn, a 49-year-old from Munich and a 58-year-old from northern Germany who had been living in Paraguay for many years – all of whom are accused of operating the site.

The fourth man, a 64-year-old from Hamburg, is accused of uploading more than 3,500 images and videos to the site since becoming a member in 2019 – making him one of the most prolific contributors.

Police said the site was designed to allow the international exchange of child abuse material by its members, mainly focusing on the abuse of young boys.

‘Among the images and video recordings shared were also recordings of the most severe sexual abuse of young children,’ prosecutors said. 

Members were also able to speak with one-another via chat areas of the website and voice channels.

Officers say the three main suspects also provided members with instructions on anonymous surfing to minimize the risk of detection. 

The site was detected by a task for set up in Germany, but aided by investigators in the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, the United States and Canada. 

Following the raids and arrests, the BOYSTOWN platform has been taken down, dark web market urls police added.

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NEW YORK, Jan 26 (Reuters) – Cybercriminals laundered $8.6 billion in cryptocurrencies last year, up 30% from 2020, darknet market lists according to a report from blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis released on Wednesday.

Overall, darknet market cybercriminals have laundered more than $33 billion worth of crypto since 2017, Chainalysis estimated, with most of the total over time moving to centralized exchanges.

The firm said the sharp rise in money laundering activity in 2021 was not surprising, given the significant growth of both legitimate and illegal crypto activity last year.

Money laundering refers to that process of disguising the origin of illegally obtained money by transferring it to legitimate businesses.

About 17% of the $8.6 billion laundered went to decentralized finance applications, Chainalysis said, referring to the sector dark market list darknet market onion which facilitates crypto-denominated financial transactions outside of traditional banks.

That was up from 2% in 2020.

Mining pools, high-risk exchanges, and mixers also saw substantial increases in value received from illicit addresses, the report said.

Mixers typically combine potentially identifiable or tainted cryptocurrency funds with others, so as to conceal the trail to the fund’s original source.

Wallet addresses associated with theft sent just under half of their stolen funds, or more than $750 million worth of crypto in total, to decentralized finance platforms, according to the Chainalysis report.

Chainalysis also clarified that the $8.6 billion laundered last year represents funds derived from crypto-native crime such as darknet markets Url darknet market sales or ransomware attacks in which profits are in crypto instead of fiat currencies.

“It’s more difficult to measure how much fiat currency derived from off-line crime – traditional drug trafficking, for example – is converted into cryptocurrency to be laundered,” Chainalysis said in the report.

“However, we know anecdotally this is happening.” (Reporting by Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss; Editing by Himani Sarkar)

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Washington has announced sanctions against a cryptocurrency exchange it says has worked with ransomware attackers

The United States imposed sanctions Tuesday on cryptocurrency exchange SUEX for its ties to ransomware extortionists, as Washington seeks to crack down on a sharp rise in digital crime attacks.

The move marks the first US sanctions against a virtual currency exchange and they come as President Joe Biden’s administration has been under pressure to act after high-profile hacks and data breaches.

The attacks on a major US oil pipeline, darknet market links a meatpacking company and Microsoft Exchange email system caused real-world problems and drew attention to the vulnerability to US infrastructure to digital pirates.

The US Treasury Department, which announced the sanctions, did not say if SUEX was implicated in any of those incidents, but noted that 40 percent of the exchange’s known transaction history was linked to “illicit actors.”

“Some virtual currency exchanges are exploited by malicious actors, but others, as is the case with SUEX, facilitate illicit activities for their own illicit gains,” a Treasury statement said, adding they are the first sanctions against a crypto exchange.

As a result of the sanctions, any assets of the platform under US jurisdiction are now blocked and Americans are barred from using SUEX.

– $10 million reward –

Crypto experts from Chainalysis noted large sums had moved through the platform, much of it from suspect sources.

“In Bitcoin alone, SUEX’s deposit addresses hosted at large exchanges have received over $160 million from ransomware actors, scammers and darknet market operators,” said a report from Chainalysis, darkmarket link which provides data on cryptocurrency.

SUEX is registered in the Czech Republic, and has branches in Russia and the Middle East.

Chainalysis said the US designation is important because it “represents significant action” by Washington to combat the money laundering that is key to digital crime.

The United States also issued a fresh warning against companies and individuals paying ransoms to unlock their files seized by ransomware hackers.

It noted that Americans could face penalties themselves if they are involved in making ransom payments as the United States already has a blacklist of people and countries, some of which are linked to ransomware attacks.

Tuesday’s announcement comes after Washington in July offered $10 million rewards for information on online extortionists abroad as it stepped up efforts to halt a sharp rise in ransomware attacks.

This year has seen a slew of prominent ransomware attacks which have disrupted a US pipeline, a meat processor and the software firm Kaseya — affecting 1,500 businesses, many of them far from the limelight.

Some $350 million was paid to malicious cyber actors last year, a spike of 300 percent from 2019, according to the Department of Homeland dark web darknet market links Security.

US officials say many of the attacks originate in Russia although they have debated to what extent there is state involvement.

Russia denies responsibility.

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

German investigators were assisted in their months-long probe by U.S. authorities and by Australian, British, Danish, Swiss, Ukrainian and 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 tor drug darknet market Bitcoin and Monero cryptocurrency to the value of more than 140 million euros ($170 million) were exchanged.

The darknet markets onion address 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, darknet markets links 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.

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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. 

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“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, dark web marketplaces 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 protection.

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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 dark web sites darknet market 2024 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, 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 darkmarket 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 darknet markets onion 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.”

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

: CNET hunts for innovation outside the Silicon Valley bubble. 

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The “BOYSTOWN” platform has existed since at least June 2019 and was only accessible via the so-called darknet market, the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office and dark darknet market list the BKA Federal Police said in a statement.

The website has more than 400,000 users and was used for the worldwide exchange of child pornography.

It enabled members to retrieve child pornography content and exchange footage with each other in chat areas as well as via voice channels.

“Among the images and video recordings shared were also recordings of the most severe sexual abuse of young children,” prosecutors said.

Police arrested three main suspects, who are accused of operating and maintaining the platform, during raids on seven properties in mid-April.

The suspects are a 40-year-old man living in Paderborn in western Germany, a 49-year-old man from the Munich area and a 58-year-old man from northern Germany who has been living in South America for several years, police said.

A fourth man, a 64-year-old from Hamburg, has also been arrested on suspicion of having registered as a member of the platform in July 2019 and dark market list having posted over 3,500 contributions on the site, making him one of the most active users.

Following the raids, the BOYSTOWN platform has been taken down, police said.

(Reporting by Caroline Copley; Editing by Giles Elgood)

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