September 18th, 2008
DarkMarket ID theft message board shuts down
DarkMarket, an infamous underground message board that provides a haven for identity thieves to buy, trade and sell stolen data, plans to shut down operations.
According to Threat Level’s Kevin Poulsen, the three-year-old forum will go dark on October 4. The shutdown plan follows the recent arrest of Cagatay Evyapan, a Turkish hacker who was one of DarkMarket’s administrators. Evyapan, who used the hacker moniker “Cha0,” was a notorious underground figure who sold ATM-skimming devices.
Here’s a portion of the shutdown notice:
“[R]ecent events have proven that even in our best efforts to expel and deactivate the accounts of suspected LE [law enforcement], reporters, and security agents, it is obvious that we haven’t been entirely successful,” Splyntr wrote in a message on the site.
“It is apparent that this forum … is attracting too much attention from a lot of the world services (agents of FBI, SS, and Interpol),” wrote Splyntr. “I guess it was only time before this would happen. It is very unfortunate that we have come to this situation, because … we have established DM as the premier English speaking forum for conducting business. Such is life. When you are on top, people try to bring you down.”
Poulsen reports that DarkMarket was the last known survivor from a handful of underground forums used by online scammers to do business. Back in 2005, as part of “Operation Firewall,” law enforcement officials successfully infiltrated and shut down the ShadowCrew marketplace.
Ryan Naraine is a journalist and security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab. He manages Threatpost.com, a security news portal. Here is Ryan's full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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