Darkode domain seized during Operation Shrouded Horizon (DOJ image)

dark0de, also known as Darkode, is a

cybercrime A cybercrime is a crime that involves a computer or a computer network.Moore, R. (2005) "Cyber crime: Investigating High-Technology Computer Crime," Cleveland, Mississippi: Anderson Publishing. The computer may have been used in committing the ...

forum Forum or The Forum (plural forums or fora) may refer to: Common uses * Forum (legal), designated space for public expression in the United States *Forum (Roman), open public space within a Roman city **Roman Forum, most famous example *Internet ...

and

black market A black market, underground economy, or shadow economy is a clandestine market or series of transactions that has some aspect of illegality or is characterized by noncompliance with an institutional set of rules. If the rule defines the se ...

place described by Europol as "the most prolific English-speaking

cybercriminal A cybercrime is a crime that involves a computer or a computer network.Moore, R. (2005) "Cyber crime: Investigating High-Technology Computer Crime," Cleveland, Mississippi: Anderson Publishing. The computer may have been used in committing the ...

forum to date". This site which was launched in 2007, serves as a venue for the sale and trade of hacking services,

botnet A botnet is a group of Internet-connected devices, each of which runs one or more bots. Botnets can be used to perform Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, steal data, send spam, and allow the attacker to access the device and its conn ...

malware Malware (a portmanteau for ''malicious software'') is any software intentionally designed to cause disruption to a computer, server, client, or computer network, leak private information, gain unauthorized access to information or systems, depri ...

, stolen personally identifiable information, credit card information, hacked server credentials, and other illicit goods and services.

History

In early 2013, it came under a large

DDoS In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host A ...

attack moving from

bulletproof hosting Bulletproof hosting (BPH) is technical infrastructure service provided by an Internet hosting service that is resilient to complaints of illicit activities, which serves criminal actors as a basic building block for streamlining various cybera ...

provider Santrex to Off-shore, the latter being a participant of the

Stophaus The Spamhaus Project is an international organisation based in the Principality of Andorra, founded in 1998 by Steve Linford to track email spammers and Spam (electronic), spam-related activity. The name ''spamhaus'', a pseudo-German expression, ...

campaign against

Spamhaus The Spamhaus Project is an international organisation based in the Principality of Andorra, founded in 1998 by Steve Linford to track email spammers and spam-related activity. The name ''spamhaus'', a pseudo-German expression, was coined by Linf ...

. The site has had an ongoing feud with security researcher

Brian Krebs Brian Krebs (born 1972) is an American journalist and investigative reporter. He is best known for his coverage of profit-seeking cybercriminals.Perlroth, Nicole.Reporting From the Web's Underbelly. ''The New York Times''. Retrieved February 28, ...

. In April 2014, various site users were attacked via the

Heartbleed Heartbleed was a security bug in the OpenSSL cryptography library, which is a widely used implementation of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. It was introduced into the software in 2012 and publicly disclosed in April 2014. Heartble ...

exploit, gaining access to private areas of the site.

Take down

The forum was the target of

Operation Shrouded Horizon Operation Shrouded Horizon was an 18-month international law enforcement investigation culminating in the July 2015 seizure of Darkode, an online cybercrime forum and black market, and the arrest of several of its members. The case involved law ...

, an international law enforcement effort led by the

Federal Bureau of Investigation The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. Operating under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, ...

which culminated in the site's seizure and arrests of several of its members in July 2015. According to the FBI, the case is "believed to be the largest-ever coordinated law enforcement effort directed at an online cyber criminal forum". Upon announcing the 12 charges issued by the United States, Attorney David Hickton called the site "a cyber hornet's nest of criminal hackers", "the most sophisticated English-speaking forum for criminal computer hackers in the world" which "represented one of the gravest threats to the integrity of data on computers in the United States". On Monday, September 21, 2015, Daniel Placek appeared on the podcast

Radiolab ''Radiolab'' is a radio program produced by WNYC, a public radio station in New York City, and broadcast on public radio stations in the United States. The show is nationally syndicated and is available as a podcast. Live shows were first offe ...

discussing his role in starting Darkode and his eventual cooperation with the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

government in its efforts to take down the site.

Revivals

Only two weeks after the announcement of the raid, the site reappeared with increased security, employing

blockchain A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) that consists of growing lists of records, called ''blocks'', that are securely linked together using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a ...

-based authentication and operating on the Tor anonymity network. Researchers from MalwareTech suggested the relaunch was not genuine, and almost immediately after, it was hacked and its database leaked. On December 13, a version of the site returned on the original

domain name A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. As ...

References

External links

Darkode archive projectNews about Dark0deThe User’s Guide to Darkode: A Complete History and How to Use It
Internet forums Cybercrime Tor onion services Darknet markets Hacker groups Domain name seizures by United States {{internet-forum-stub

History

Take down

Revivals

See also

References

External links