German authorities have taken down the Hydra marketplace – a popular destination on the Dark Web for trading in illicit goods & services, including cyber-attack tools & stolen data.
The underground market traded in drugs, stolen data, forged documents etc. & took in billions in Bitcoin.
This week, they were able to take offline related infrastructure such as servers, plus install a takedown banner in place of a working website, all while seizing $25m (€23m) in funds.
Russian-Language
“The illegal marketplace was a Russian-language Darknet platform that had been accessible via the Tor network since at least 2015,” according to a Tues. statement from Frankfurt’s public prosecutor (ZIT) & Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA).
“Their focus was on trading in illegal narcotics. In addition, data spied out worldwide, forged documents & digital services were offered profitably via the platform.”
Seizure
Security firm Elliptic stated that it confirmed the seizure, which occurred on April 5 in a series of 88 transactions amounting to 543.3 BTC, according to a post about the Hydra crackdown on Tues. It also revealed that since its inception, Hydra has taken in around $5b in Bitcoin.
The takedown operation has been in progress since last Aug., according to the notice, & included co-operation from US authorities. The investigation found that Hydra had 17m customer accounts & more than 19,000 registered sellers, with a global turnover of $1.34b (€1.23b) just in 2020. alone. Finding that information was not easy, the agencies noted.
Highest Turnover
“In particular, the Bitcoin Bank Mixer, a service for hiding digital transactions provided by the platform, made crypto-investigations extremely difficult for law enforcement agencies,” the posting noted. In the end they discovered that “Hydra…was probably the illegal marketplace with the highest turnover worldwide.”
Prosecutors are charging Hydra operators & administrators with charges of commercially operating a criminal trading platform on the internet; the commercial procurement or granting of an opportunity for the unauthorised purchase or the unauthorised sale of narcotics; & commercial money laundering.
Illegal Dark Markets
Given their status as central to the Dark Web underground economy for cyber-criminals & narcotics traders alike, international authorities have continued to put effort into dismantling underground markets.
One of the earliest success was the dismantling of Joker’s Stash in late 2020. It was a popular cyber-criminal destination that specialised in trading in payment-card data, offering millions of stolen credit & debit cards to buyers.
Purchasers of the information can create cloned cards to physically use at cash machines or at in-store machines that are not chip-enabled; or they can simply use the information to buy things online. Law enforcement managed to disable its blockchain DNS sites as well as Tor addresses.
Then in 2021, Europol announced the takedown of Dark Market, which according to the law enforcement agency was “the world’s largest illegal marketplace on the Dark Web.”
500,000 Users
Dark Market served as a marketplace for cyber-criminals to buy & sell drugs, counterfeit money, stolen or counterfeit credit card data, anonymous SIM cards & malware. According to Europol, Dark Market had almost 500,000 users & more than 2,400 sellers at the time of closure.
In addition, “several darknet services have also voluntarily closed down over the winter of 2021-22,” concludes Elliptic.
