Dig Into the Deep Web

Mention the “Deep Web” and most people will instantly associate it with the part of the Internet used for nefarious and illegal activities. For others, it is this inaccessible side of the Web, the one that requires a lot of technical skill and know-how to reach. Although these assumptions are somewhat correct, they only cover a small portion of the Deep Web as a whole.

Two sides of the coin
Anonymity is the main feature of the Deep Web, and there are plenty of people who would want to use and abuse that. For example, people who want to shield their communications from government surveillance may want to take refuge in darknets. Whistleblowers, like Edward Snowden, can share vast amounts of insider information to journalists without leaving a paper trail. Dissidents in restrictive regimes may need anonymity in order to safely let the world know what’s happening in their country.
On the flipside, those with malicious intentions can also greatly benefit from this anonymity. For example, drug sellers wouldn’t want to set up shop in an online location where law enforcement can easily determine their IP address. The same could be said for those engaged in other illegal activities like selling contraband and stolen goods.
Digging into the Deep Web
We decided to look further down the rabbit hole to get more information about the illegal activities and services offered in the Deep Web. To get information, we employed our system, called the Deep Web Analyzer (DeWa). DeWa is responsible for collecting URLs linked to the Deep Web, including TOR- and I2P-hidden sites and Freenet resource identifiers, and trying to extract relevant information tied to them like page content, links, email addresses, HTTP headers, and so on.
So far, we’ve collected more than 38 million events that account for 576,000 URLs, 244,000 of which bear actual HTML content.
DeWa also has a feature that alerts us if hidden services get a lot of traffic or if there is a large hike in number of sites. This is especially helpful in finding new malware families of cybercriminals who use TOR-hidden services to hide the more permanent parts of their infrastructures.
Cybercrime in the Deep Web
Among our observations was the fact that light drugs (read: cannabis) were the most-exchanged goods, followed by pharmaceutical products like Ritalin and Xanax, hard drugs, and even pirated games and online accounts.

The Deep Web is also home to Bitcoin and money-laundering services. Bitcoin offers a level of anonymity for users. As long as they don’t link their wallet code to their real identities, they are, to some extent, anonymous. Nonetheless, Bitcoin transactions are public, which means investigators can still examine them. Numerous services have sprouted in the Deep Web, offering to move Bitcoins through a network via micro transactions. Paying a handling fee will result in the customer getting the same amount of money but with the added bonus of having transactions that are harder to track or pin down.

The challenge of the Deep Web
Anonymity in the Deep Web will continue to raise a lot of issues and be a point of interest for both law enforcers and Internet users who want to circumvent government surveillance and intervention. Right now, there seems to be a race between “extreme libertarians” and law enforcement agencies, with the former trying to find new ways to become even more anonymous and untraceable.

Did The #2 Largest Dark Net Market, BlackBank, Exit Scammed?

So, BlackBank market, one of the 3 current leading markets has been down for the past week or so for “security maintenance” (Does implementing a tumbler ring any sheep bells?)
The most recent news posted on Blackbanks’ sub Reddit by blackbank_team, one of the market support staffer, seems to indicate that the admin, MDparity is no longer communicating, a strong indicator that this might be another exit scam in a long line of markets who decided to vanish with their users funds – with evolution being the biggest so far, this is the Reddit thread posted by the support staffer:

I know, you’re afraid and i’m afraid too that mdparity will never ever come back
But to answer all of your questions
My messages here aren’t usually pgp signed, but there are only 2 persons who have credentials for this profile
I can’t believe mdparity has decided to exit scam now, if he has done it i’m astonished, but i believe he hasn’t done it, some might have happened to him, since he’s not answering my messages
I will give him until the first day of june before declaring BlackBank dead, so let’s wait toghether
MrDoe

Since many markets are currently experiencing Ddos attacks and are currently down, it might be an easy opportunity for market admins to disappear without anyone noticing until its too late.
To be clear – this is not a confirmed exit scammed, but it sure starting to look like one, so we will be following and updating.