Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cybercrime

Dark Web Market AlphaBay Goes Down

AlphaBay, a Dark Web markerplace for illegal products, went down last week after authorities seized equipment following raids in three different countries.

AlphaBay, a Dark Web markerplace for illegal products, went down last week after authorities seized equipment following raids in three different countries.

Following the incident, vendors selling their products on AlphaBay began to flock to other Dark Web marketplaces, a transition that apparently started to cause technical issues on some of these portals. AlphaBay supposedly had over 400,000 users last week.

AlphaBay was the most popular marketplace on the Dark Web, followed by RAMP (Russian), Dream Market, Hansa Market, and Silk road 3.1. Launched in December 2014 and already having over 200,000 users by October 2015, AlphaBay saw an influx of users after a similar portal called TheRealDeal disappeared last summer.

The exact reason for AlphaBay’s demise remains unclear at the moment, but there is some speculation that its admins might have pulled off an exit scam, shutting down the portal and stealing crypto-currency from escrow wallets, BleepingComputer’s Catalin Cimpanu notes.

Others, however, suggest the marketplace was taken down after authorities raided various locations in the United States, Canada and Thailand on July 5. AlphaBay went down the same day the raids happened, and the Wall Street Journal reports the law enforcement operation resulted in the portal’s shutdown.

Authorities apparently confirmed three raids in Canada and another in Thailand, but didn’t confirm that they were related to the Dark Web marketplace. While only equipment was reportedly seized in Canada, Alexander Cazes, 26, was arrested in Thailand, where authorities seized assets valued at over $11 million.

Cazes, supposedly the individual running AlphaBay, allegedly gave his consent to be extradited to the United States after a request from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. On Wednesday morning, he was found dead in his cell at the Narcotics Suppression Bureau in Bangkok’s Laksi district.

Ilia Kolochenko, CEO of web security company High-Tech Bridge, pointed out in an emailed comment to SecurityWeek that, although there’s no safe harbor for cybercriminals operating illegal marketplaces such as AlphaBay, the portal’s demise is likely to result in miscreants taking measures to better secure their operations.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

“Dark Web gives an illusion of safety and anonymity to many unexperienced users. This case is a good example that there is no safe harbor for cybercrime marketplaces operating on the global scale. Users erroneously believe that bitcoin or tor can assure their undetectability, but this assumption is wrong. There are many other ways to trace and unmask them via weaknesses in tangential technologies, or just by using social engineering or even their own garrulity against them,” Kolochenko said.

Last year, 35-year-old Aaron James Glende from Winona, Minnesota, was sentenced to four years and two months in prison for selling stolen information on AlphaBay. In January this year, a Reddit user demonstrated he could read any private message the dark web marketplace.

“However, this news is rather a bad one in the long run. I think, other illegal market places will quickly learn the lesson and take all measures to secure their platforms and operators. We will probably see many new smaller places restricted only to ‘trusted’ sellers and verified buyers. This will seriously impede any further investigation and police raids,” Kolochenko concluded.

Earlier this year, darknet marketplace Hansa announced the launch of a bug bounty program with rewards of up to 10 bitcoins, in an effort to minimize chances of the website being hacked.

Related: Flaw Exposed Private Messages of AlphaBay Users

Written By

Ionut Arghire is an international correspondent for SecurityWeek.

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Understand how to go beyond effectively communicating new security strategies and recommendations.

Register

Join us for an in depth exploration of the critical nature of software and vendor supply chain security issues with a focus on understanding how attacks against identity infrastructure come with major cascading effects.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Cybercrime

As it evolves, web3 will contain and increase all the security issues of web2 – and perhaps add a few more.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Cybercrime

Luxury retailer Neiman Marcus Group informed some customers last week that their online accounts had been breached by hackers.

Cybercrime

Zendesk is informing customers about a data breach that started with an SMS phishing campaign targeting the company’s employees.

Artificial Intelligence

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 has demonstrated the potential of AI for both good and bad.

Cybercrime

Satellite TV giant Dish Network confirmed that a recent outage was the result of a cyberattack and admitted that data was stolen.

Cybercrime

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft calls attention to a series of zero-day remote code execution attacks hitting its Office productivity suite.