Siege to the dark digital souks

Siege to the dark digital souks

Drugs, drugs, weapons or stolen accounts. The depths of the internet are home to markets that traffic illegal assets

   Open 24 hours, seven days a week, and twelve months a year. It is not the digital store of a large clothing chain or even services such as Netflix or Spotify . They are dark souks, refugees in the sewers of internet, also known by the English voice ' Dark Web '. There is not common mortals, is not accessed by searching for something in Google or typing an address in the bar of any browser.

To these places can only be accessed through TOR , a special program that hides your IP - the code that recognizes the computer or computer from which you connect - and other key data. That is why it has become the perfect place for the proliferation of communities where weapons, non-prescription drugs, drugs and a myriad of things such as stolen accounts or access codes are sold. Until a few years ago this seemed an oasis for cybercrime where the authorities could not penetrate but history has changed.

    A few days ago, the FBI and Europol congratulated each other on having delivered the biggest blow to these digital markets. In the most important operation in recent decades against cybercrime, these police forces have managed to dismantle Alphabay and Hansa , two of the big sites that sold illegal products in the 'Dark Web'.

It is the second major blow in this particular fight after an operation last year also knocked down Silk Road . However, on this occasion there is talk that the sites closed this month were ten times more popular in terms of users. In total, they had made more than 350,000 illegal shipments around the world.

Entering Alphabay - the web had been out of play for several weeks, but the reason was unknown - it was like doing it in an illicit Amazon . Products such as marijuana had their product sheet, the vendor's reliability, its origin and a menu to choose the type of shipment, from standard to 'express' for the most eager buyers.

They calculate that since its opening in 2014, the volume of business of this community was 1,000 million dollars and that it had a deposit of 'bitcoins' and other digital currencies of up to four million. The reason for the use of this cryptocurrency is none other than to make it difficult to trace the origin of the money, making it almost impossible to find out who made the payments.

Dead in the cell

The operation has not been free of controversy, since the founder of Alphabay, Alexandre Cazes , was found dead in his cell in Thailand two days before the announcement of the FBI. The authorities of the Asian country had arrested him shortly before at the request of the United States. A situation that the only thing that has done has been to shoot the conjectures about a conspiracy.

One of the most common questions is how physical goods are shipped from this type of platform. In the end, thanks to encryption and encryption, digital purchases are relatively easy to reach their recipients without raising suspicion. But a gun? It is worth mentioning that weapons used in crimes in Europe have been pointed out by researchers as possible purchases of the 'Dark Web'.

The trick is not another, according to an investigation of RAND Corporation, that disassemble in pieces and send them separately in packages of printers, cameras or speakers to not raise any suspicion in the customs. However, according to this report, only 1% of the sales of these sites are weapons . Yes, many manuals are sold on how to make homemade bombs or even patterns to print pistols in 3D.

Regardless of this, different groups ask to differentiate between 'Dark Web' and 'Deep Web' . The deep Internet, which has been used by cybercriminals for their criminal purposes, has also served for many other groups. Some of these are journalists and activists who have found in tools such as the TOR network a way out of censorship and punishment of countries in conflict or dictatorships. The level of anonymity of these solutions is such that an agency such as the US National Security Agency has had it in the spotlight since its popularization following Edward Snowden's revelations about government espionage.