Darkode black market is back online with security improvements! – The administrator of the popular Darkode hacking forum has announced that the platform will be back online soon with new security improvements.
A few days ago, Darkcode, a black market specializing in the sale of exploit kits and hacking, was taken down by an international operation by authorities.
A joint operation led by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies in Europe and Brazil has led to the identification and arrest of more than 60 people suspected of carrying out hacking crimes. According to media reports, all of the suspects are associated with the online criminal forum dαrκοde.
The FBI along with Europol and the Brazilian Federal Police had been monitoring the cybercriminal forum since March, the operation resulting in 62 arrests in 18 countries around the world, Colombia, Germany, India and the United Kingdom.
While the British NCA announced that a total of five suspects had been arrested in connection with DarkCode between November 2013 and March 2015, on July 26 the administrator of the controversial criminal forum announced that his staff had not been affected by the authorities' activity.
According to the administrator who uses the online pseudonym Sp3cial1st, after Darkcode was seized on July 14, he was waiting for the identities of those arrested to be revealed before deciding whether to bring the forum back online.
The security expert who runs the blog MalwareTech published the list of those arrested, who were active on the Darkode forum in recent years:
• h0tsh0t
• Mafi AKA Crim AKA Synthet!c (DαrΚοde Administrator)
• Parabola (DαrΚοde Administrator)
• Nocen
• Phastman • semaph0re
•
m3t4lh34d
• rzor
• k@exploit.im
• Android (Developer of the Dendroid trojan)
• SpliT
• WesTThug
“It is interesting to note that only two of those arrested had been active on darkcode in previous years, suggesting that the FBI may have been putting together a list of known criminals who were also on darkcode, rather than targeting the forum itself,” he states in a blog post.
On July 26, Sp3cial1st apparently announced on darkode.cc that the popular Darkode forum is moving to the Tor network and that he will be assigning each user their own .onion address on the forum to improve the authentication process. The countermeasure adopted by Sp3cial1st will prevent misuse of Darkode through infiltrations that will give administrators a head start on user access, by creating a separate log file for each onion.
"Most of the staff are intact, along with senior management. It appears the raids were focused on recently added users or people who have been retired for years.".
The forum will return to onion land, it will be for viewing only, and only members who we can confirm are still activewill be given an invitation,” states the Dark code administrator.
