Security Experts:

Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cybercrime

Hacking Forum Darkode Dismantled in Multi-Nation Operation

A hacking forum described as the world’s most savvy English-speaking online watering hole for criminal computer gurus has been smashed, US and European officials said Wednesday.

A total of 28 people were arrested and 12 were charged.

A hacking forum described as the world’s most savvy English-speaking online watering hole for criminal computer gurus has been smashed, US and European officials said Wednesday.

A total of 28 people were arrested and 12 were charged.

Darkode, as it was called, was a password-protected forum where hackers and other cyber criminals conferred to buy, sell, trade and share ideas and tools for breaking into people’s computers and other devices, the officials said.

“The Darkode forum was the place to go to if you were an English-speaking cybercriminal,” Europol said in a statement.

Darkode was taken down this week in an operation by 20 countries including the United States and such far flung nations as Australia and Cyprus.

It was the largest coordinated international law enforcement effort ever directed at an online cyber-criminal forum, the Justice Department said.

US officials in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Washington, DC and Louisiana brought charges against 12 people. It did not say if they were actually arrested.

The charges were part of the 20-member coalition’s effort to charge, arrest, or search 70 Darkode members and associated around the world, the Justice Department said.

Darkode had 250 to 300 active users, Europol said. A total of 28 people were arrested in this week’s raids, it added.

Membership in the forum was by invitation only. Prospective members had to show they had skills or products to present to the group, officials said.

Darkode was brought down thanks to FBI infiltration of its membership, the US Department of Justice said.

“Through this operation, we have dismantled a cyber hornets’ nest of criminal hackers which was believed by many, including the hackers themselves, to be impenetrable,” US Attorney David Hickton said.

The operation was led by the FBI and backed up by Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, known as EC3.

“The curtain fell on the cybercriminal forum when the site was taken down and a banner was put up online indicating that the FBI, EC3 and international partners had control over the site,” the Europol statement said.

Darkode was among the top five of the most prolific criminal forums worldwide, Europol said. It said this list was otherwise dominated by Russian-speaking criminal platforms.

Written By

AFP 2023

Click to comment

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.

Join this webinar to learn best practices that organizations can use to improve both their resilience to new threats and their response times to incidents.

Register

Join this live webinar as we explore the potential security threats that can arise when third parties are granted access to a sensitive data or systems.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

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

Cybercrime

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

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

Application Security

PayPal is alerting roughly 35,000 individuals that their accounts have been targeted in a credential stuffing campaign.

Cybercrime

No one combatting cybercrime knows everything, but everyone in the battle has some intelligence to contribute to the larger knowledge base.

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

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