Darkmarket forum closed following police raids

The Darkmarket forum has been closed down following police raids.

Dawn raids saw around 60 people arrested in Manchester, Hull and London, as well as Germany, Turkey and the US. The forum was used by criminals to buy and sell credit card details and bank logins and was running for around three years.

It was described as a ‘one stop shop' for criminals, with Serious Organised Crime Agency deputy director Sharon Lemon claiming: “You can go to the forum and engage in criminal activity quite freely. You can buy any product you want, you can sell any product you want. These are serious and organised criminals, and they can vary. You can be the beginner who can go onto the site, get a tutorial and start your life of crime.”

Soca claimed that there were 2,000 users registered on Darkmarket, but many of those were not unique.

SC revealed earlier that the FBI had used Darkmarket to capture the details of thousands of hackers and spammers via an undercover agent posing as a forum member.

Greg Day, security expert at McAfee, said: “This gives plenty of kudos to Soca and other agents who co-operated in shutting this site down. The bad news is that cyber crime is far more organised than we have given credit, as this served as a collaboration of scammers.

This is an example of where ideas were exchanged and people were educated in cyber crime. I can only believe that there is more sites out there and the challenge is how to monitor it, the internet is so huge it is like looking for a needle in a haystack, we see examples of where data is collected and we can see information is collected in this meeting point.

“Next we may see the likes of Second Life monitored, but how to police every environment to make sure it is not a meeting point is a challenge. There is a need for co-operation between the police and network service providers, but the providers are not there to police.

"Despite that, this is a timely reminder on the run up to Christmas that there is a real threat, and it is all too easy to be caught out and people need to realise that it does happen and they need to be conscious.”

See original article on scmagazineuk.com

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