News broke yesterday that Europol have seized control of 20,000 rogue websites, peddling drugs and counterfeit goods on the dark web, in a major blow to the online black market. Kyle Wilhoit, Senior Cybersecurity Threat Researcher at DomainTools commented below.
Kyle Wilhoit, Senior Cybersecurity Threat Researcher at DomainTools:
“The shutdown of these underground marketplaces are becoming ever more commonplace. The shutdown of AlphaBay and Hansa earlier this year will have led to criminals with established business on these sites into peddling their goods on some of these less known sites, which now leaves a further gap in the underground market. Individuals with nefarious intentions must either migrate to another underground shop with less reputation, or they must find alternate business techniques, such as selling on deep web forums. Ultimately, this isn’t surprising- considering other marketplaces have been compromised on several separate occasions. When you are conducting business with criminals, you must expect to some degree that your business is on shaky footing anyway, so this isn’t terribly surprising to me.”
