There's been a significant rise in the number of dark web listings for malware and other hacking tools which target the enterprise, and an increasing number of underground vendors are touting tools that are designed to target particular industries.

A study by cybersecurity company Bromium and criminologists at the University of Surrey involved researchers studying underground forums and interacting with cyber-criminal vendors. The study found that the dark web is fast becoming a significant source of bespoke malware.

In many cases, the dark web sellers demonstrated intimate knowledge of email systems, networks and even cybersecurity protocols in a way that suggests they themselves have spent a lot of time inside enterprise networks, raising questions about security for some companies.

"What surprised me is the extent you could obtain malware targeting enterprise, you could obtain operational data relating to enterprise," Mike McGuire, senior lecturer in Criminology at the University of Surrey and author of the study, told ZDNet.

"There seems to be an awareness and sophistication among these cyber criminals, to go for the big fry, to go where the money is, as a criminal, and the enterprise is providing that," he said, adding: "What surprised me is just how easy it is to get hold of it if you want to."

McGuire and his team interacted with around 30 sellers on dark web marketplaces – sometimes on forums, sometimes via encrypted channels, sometimes by email – and the findings have been detailed in the Behind the Dark Net Black Mirror report.

The study calculated that since 2016, there's been a 20 percent rise in the number of dark web listings that have the potential to harm the enterprise.

Malware and distributed denial of service (DDoS) form almost half of the attacks on offer – a quarter of the listings examined advertised malware and one in five offered DDoS and botnet services. Other common services targeting enterprises that were for sale include espionage tools, such as remote-access Trojans and keyloggers.

The arrest of two Delhi youths for the import and sale of illegal marijuana through the darknet in December last year sparked widespread discussion on the rising prominence of the darknet in India. With dark net being the new market for drug peddlers and illegal traders, it is slowly becoming one of the most challenging problems to be tackled in this cyber age.

What is the darknet?

The world wide web can be divided into three categories- the surface web, the deep web and the dark web. While pages on the surface web(visible web ) are indexed and can be easily accessed by the public, pages on the deep web are not indexed and hence cannot be readily accessed. The content of the deep web is hidden behind HTTP forms and includes many common uses such as webmail, online banking, and services that users must pay for, and which is protected by a paywall, such as a video on demand, some online magazines and newspapers, and many more. Content of the deep web can be located and accessed by a direct URL or IP address and may require a password or other security access past the public website page. The dark web is that part of the internet which can be accessed only by ‘overlay networks ‘ and needs special browsers like TOR to access. Browsers like TOR ensure anonymity to the host as well as the user, by protecting the IP address with its ‘overlay network’ structure.

Illicit drugs, weapons and online fraud : the endless dangers of darknet

The promise of anonymity the darknet offers has led to an alarming increase in its use in the last 4 years. A 2015 study showed that drugs are the most traded commodity on the dark web and 26 per cent of its content can be classified as ‘child exploitation’. A December 2014 study by Gareth Owen from the University of Portsmouth found that the most commonly hosted type of content on Tor was child pornography, followed by black markets. Stolen credit card details, forged documents, counterfeit currency and weapons are the other types of content. Reports of crowdfunded assassinations, hitmen and live streamed murders are believed to be available on the darknet.

How does it work?

Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin are used for transactions on the darknet. Purchases on the darknet come with reviews and ratings just like on Amazon and Flipkart and are delivered to the customer’s doorstep just like any other order. Service providers like ‘escrow’ ensure that the transaction is made to the seller only after the customer receives the package. Often disguised, these illegal products mostly make their way through customs to the customers' doorstep.

Cracking the whip :

Though highly evasive, browsers like Tor aren’t completely untraceable. In early November, a coordinated action by the FBI and Europol known as Operation Onymous seized dozens of Tor hidden services, including three of the six most popular drug markets on the Dark Web. For now, just how the feds located those sites remains a mystery.

“ The Interpol, Europol and the FBI are the ones striving hard to keep the darknet dangers in check”, says J.Prasanna, Director of Cyber Security and Privacy Foundation, Singapore.

” The first step towards net safety comes down to parental supervision”, says J .Prasanna who provides dark web monitoring for banks.

“ The Indian government should ensure stringent punishment for the offenders using darknet for illegal trade and activities. The police department too should be technologically advanced to handle such crimes”, says V.Rajendran, Chairman, Digital Security Association of India.


The bright side :

It would be safe to say not everything is dark about the darknet. The privacy it provides is a major attraction to many who are looking to escape the watchful eyes of service providers and federal agencies. Anonymous messenger services and access to tonnes of resources (data, books, documents) argues the use of darknet for good.

Author:
Yamuna Chandran

A serial hacker who goes by the name of Gnosticplayers has released another 65.5 million records of users last week taking his grand total of 932 million records overall, with the consequences of the data pool as yet unknown. Since mid-February, Gnosticplayers has been putting batches of hacked data on Dream Market, which is a dark web marketplace for selling illegal products like hacking tools guns and drugs.

"The hacker's name is Gnosticplayers, and he's responsible for the hacks of 44 companies, including last week's revelations," the ZDNet reported late on Monday. The names of big companies that were hit included UnderArmor, 500px, ShareThis, MyHeritage and GfyCat. The releases have been grouped in four rounds -- Round 1 (620 million user records), Round 2 (127 million user records), Round 3 (93 million user records), and Round 4 (26.5 million user records).

"Last week, the hacker notified ZDNet about his latest release -- Round 5 -- containing the data of 65.5 million users, which the hacker claims to have been taken from six companies: gaming platform Mindjolt, digital mall Wanelo, e-invitations and RSVP platform Evite, South Korean travel company Yanolja, women's fashion store Moda Operandi, and Apple repair center iCracked," the report added.

Earlier in March, the serial hacker stole and posted personal data of close to 843 million users of various popular websites. The companies impacted include GameSalad, Estante Virtual, Coubic, LifeBear, Bukalapak and Youthmanual.

Blockchain and cryptocurrency related crimes are something heard about in a very scarce quantity. But this week, a 37 year-old man in the US has been sentenced to one year and one day in prison for fraud in connection with a Bitcoin $BTC▲2.4% phishing scheme designed to rob victims of their cryptocurrency.

Michael Richo was allegedly running an elaborate bitcoin phishing scheme, all with the purpose of stealing confidential information from unaware victims, including various sums of cryptocurrency which they held.

Richo, of New Haven, was also ordered to forfeit $352,000 in cash, various computers and electronic devices, such as digital and hardware-based wallets, which contained a vast array of different precious metals and virtual coins that he purchased with the proceeds of his offense.

It was during the trial that evidence, such as court documents from the trial in question, as well as supplementary statements, illustrate just where Richo was going in order to target individuals for his Phishing attacks – The Dark Web.

Per court documents associated with Richo’s case, he will be subject to three years of supervised release once he’s out of prison. His operation involved targeting individuals on the dark web using marketplaces.

He did so by posting fake links to online marketplaces on dark web forums. Once users clicked on them, these links would then direct users to fake login pages that resembled the real login pages for various dark web marketplaces. Once the victim entered his credentials, the hacker would steal them. He would then monitor the individual’s Bitcoin balance at the real marketplace and would withdraw the coins once the person deposited the funds. He would then either deposit the funds directly to his bitcoin wallet, or sell them on cryptocurrency exchanges for US dollars. The US dollars obtained as a result were deposited into bank accounts under his control or provided to him through Green Dot Cards, Western Union transfers, and MoneyGram transfers.

Academics from Greece have devised a new browser-based attack that can allow hackers to run malicious code inside users' browsers even after users have closed or navigated away from the web page on which they got infected.

This new attack, called MarioNet, opens the door for assembling giant botnets from users' browsers. These botnets can be used for in-browser crypto-mining (crypto jacking), DDoS attacks, malicious files hosting/sharing, distributed password cracking, creating proxy networks, advertising click-fraud, and traffic stats boosting, researchers said.
The MarioNet attack is an upgrade to a similar concept of creating a browser-based botnet that was described in the Puppetnets research paper 12 years ago, in 2007.

The difference between the two is that MarioNet can survive after users close the browser tab or move away from the website hosting the malicious code.
This is possible because modern web browsers now support a new API called Service Workers. This mechanism allows a website to isolate operations that rendering a page's user interface from operations that handle intense computational tasks so that the web page UI doesn't freeze when processing large quantities of data.

Technically, Service Workers are an update to an older API called Web Workers. However, unlike web workers, a service worker, once registered and activated, can live and run in the page's background, without requiring the user to continue browsing through the site that loaded the service worker.

MarioNet (a clever spelling of "marionette") takes advantage of the powers provided by service workers in modern browsers.

The attack routine consists of registering a service worker when the user lands on an attacker-controlled website and then abusing the Service Worker SyncManager interface to keep the service worker alive after the user navigates away.

The attack is silent and doesn't require any type of user interaction because browsers don't alert users or ask for permission before registering a service worker. Everything happens under the browser's hood as the user waits for the website to load, and users have no clue that websites have registered service workers as there's no visible indicator in any web browser.