The operation included the arrest of suspected AlphaBay founder Alexandre Cazes on 5 July, a Canadian citizen detained on behalf of the US in Thailand. Hansa Market had about 1,800 vendors selling drugs of all sorts, the Dutch authorities said on Thursday. AlphaBay grew into a business with 200,000 users and 40,000 vendors — or 10 times the size of Silk Road — the Justice Department said Thursday. In the meantime, DeSnake wants to attract users with promises of a still-unproven system he calls AlphaGuard, designed to let users withdraw their funds even if authorities once again seize the servers that run AlphaBay’s infrastructure. Implement NIST’s risk management framework, from defining risks to selecting, implementing and monitoring information security controls.

A joint law enforcement investigation involving the United States, Canada and Thailand appears to have resulted in the takedown of the world’s largest darknet marketplace, called AlphaBay. Meanwhile, one of its alleged operators has been found dead in a Bangkok jail cell. When AlphaBay became inaccessible as a result, thousands of its buyers and vendors flocked to the then law enforcement-ran Hansa market to continue their operations. Dutch police, operating servers across the Netherlands, Lithuania, and Germany, capitalized on the eight-fold surge of users visiting the market in the weeks following. The authorities used the time to gather information on high value targets and identified delivery addresses for sizable orders, passing along 10,000 international addresses of buyers to Europol.

Dark Web Links

When dark net markets are shut, their users typically move quickly to new markets. But on Thursday, news of the joint operation sent the community into a panic. AlphaBay, the largest so-called dark net market, was taken down in early July at the same time the authorities arrested the reported founder of the site, Alexandre Cazes, a Canadian man who was living in Bangkok. I’m very curious to see over the coming days and weeks how users react to the news.

One AlphaBay staff member claimed that it serviced over 200,000 users and 40,000 vendors. Comparatively, the Silk Road dark web marketplace, which was seized by law enforcement in November 2013, had reportedly approximately 14,000 listings for illicit goods and services at the time of seizure and was the largest dark web marketplace at the time. AlphaBay Market was one of the most popular darknet trading platforms. The AlphaBay marketplace was launched in 2014 and, for obvious reasons, the founders of the platform had remained unknown until AlphaBay was shut down due to law enforcement action in 2017. There were over 300,000 advertisements for drugs, arms, fake documents, stolen credit cards and other illegal goods and services.

Child Porn Dark Web

The operation included the arrest on July 5 of suspected AlphaBay founder Alexandre Cazes, a Canadian citizen arrested on behalf of the United States in Thailand. While the founder of AlphaBay, Alexandre Cazes, is dead, Herrell was in a position of power within the organization. As a moderator, Herrell was responsible for settling disputes between users, and the Department of Justice documents says that it was involved in over 20,000 such disputes. Maria Gershuni, a Flashpoint analyst, said that cybercriminals are increasingly aware that they need to steer clear of taboo subjects like ransomware and fentanyl. The man said to be the founder and leading operator of the site, Mr. Cazes, was arrested at his home in Bangkok on July 5, officials said on Thursday.

• CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.
• Furthermore, darknet users rarely draw so much attention to themselves.
• Cazes was found dead of an apparent suicide in a Thai jail cell a week after his arrest; like many in the dark web community, DeSnake believes Cazes was murdered in prison.
• Bryan Connor Herrell, a 25-year-old from Colorado, was sentenced to 11 years of prison time for acting as a moderator on the dark web marketplace AlphaBay.
• Time will tell if this AlphaBay becomes as popular as the original market – for now this is definitely one to watch.

AlphaBay and Hansa Market were successors to the first and most famous market operating on the so-called dark net, Silk Road, which the authorities took down in October 2013. After AlphaBay went down, users streamed to one of its largest competitors, Hansa Market. DeSnake counters that if law enforcement had gotten to him and launched the new AlphaBay as a honeypot, they would have simply reused the original AlphaBay’s code. And he points out that the Monero-only restriction for the site would make it far less effective for trapping unsuspecting dark web buyers than a site that simply accepts Bitcoin. Gray points to a thread on the largely Russian cybercrime forum XSS, where many commenters expressed their skepticism about DeSnake’s return, some implying that he’s being controlled by law enforcement. “Lol, how many honest comrades will DeSnake have to turn in now to leave the punishment cell?” one commenter asked in Russian.

How To Access Darknet

The new AlphaBay is claimed to be run by the other administrator, a threat actor operating under the alias DeSnake. On GhostBin, DeSnake claimed they are bringing back the forum because of the poor state of operating darknet marketplaces, and to honor the legacy of the previous moderator Alpha02 , who died by suicide in Thailand after his arrest following the seizure of the original forum. In order to prevent users from losing money to similar seizures, DeSnake said they have created a system called “AlphaGuard” which would allow threat actors operating on the forum to withdraw funds even if all servers are seized. It is relatively simple to use search engines and popular communities to find a list of darknet markets. Dream Market is mostly a drug-sales market but also includes a large amount of digital goods.

Some of these opportunistic markets quickly shut their doors, while others were scams to take advantage of buyers looking for new places to purchase illegal goods. Sheep Market absconded with more than $40 million in an elaborate exit scam. Other markets have come and gone for various reasons, including law enforcement takedowns such as Silk Road 2.0 in 2014.

We shorten the timeframe to detection of compromised data on the darknet, empowering organizations to swiftly detect security gaps and mitigate damage prior to misuse of their data. It is unheard of that a darknet service would decline and discourage donations. A fully-functional darknet marketplace will indeed provide sufficient financial resources in the future; yet refusing them from the start is unreal. The overt exclusion of CIS countries is peculiar, especially given that DeSnake and alpha02 were openly active in Russian carding communities.

Further down the road, DeSnake will get to demoing the project and bringing on a marketing team. “RCMP’s ‘Dark Web’ investigation leads to searches in Montreal, Trois-Rivières”. “AlphaBay taken down by law enforcement across 3 countries, WSJ says”. 5 July 2017Canadian police raid EBX Technologies in Montreal, Cazes’ Canadian company and the reported location of the physical servers, as well as two residential properties in Trois-Rivières.

But all of the defensive wizardry that DeSnake describes—both AlphaGuard and the decentralization project—remain largely unproven talk, says Flashpoint analyst Ian Gray, who closely monitors dark web markets. The decentralization plan, for instance, would require collective buy-in from a large number of developers and network operators for what would likely be seen as an essentially illegal project. Gray points out that DeSnake hasn’t published any code for either that system or AlphaGuard and questions why he would relaunch AlphaBay four years after its takedown without any real progress toward his decentralization dream.

I2p Darknet Sites

Never share passwords and keep an eye on bank accounts for suspicious activity. As long as there is value in data, we must take steps to secure it. Tor2door claims that security and usability are its main priorities. This market is one of the easiest to use and is very simple for inexperienced dark-net users.

DeSnake apparently eluded the takedown of AlphaBay and now plans to resurrect it.

The rules of the marketplace have been slightly amended since the previous iteration of AlphaBay and now include rules against posts dealing with fentanyl, COVID-19 vaccines, ransomware, and any activity related to Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan. Flashpoint analysts note that threat actors based in the countries of the former Soviet Union avoid targeting those countries, as to not draw attention of domestic law enforcement. Criminologist David Decary-Hetu noted this event as notable for being the first example of criminal services being sold over a darkmarket. He said, “All the cases I have heard of so far turned out to be law enforcement trying to find people of interest,” making this case unique in his experience to that point.