The marketplace was offline last week, when Dread and its sister services were under heavy DDoS and inaccessible. One notable difference compared with the old AlphaBay, however, is that for cryptocurrency, the new market will only accept monero, aka XMR. Elliptic’s Robinson said this shows the site “following in the footsteps of current market leader White House Market in shunning bitcoin” in favor of monero, which is more privacy-preserving and reputedly tougher for authorities to trace. DeSnake says AlphaBay also runs its own monero mixer – which mixes different streams of the cryptocurrency to make any given user more difficult to trace – “which guarantees that any of your monero coins will not be linked to you.” The takedown of AlphaBay—and another prominent site on the Darknet known as Hansa Market—required months of planning among law enforcement agencies around the world and was one of the most sophisticated coordinated takedowns to date in the fight against online criminal activity. The operation to seize AlphaBay’s servers was led by the FBI and involved the cooperative efforts of law enforcement agencies in Thailand, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France, along with the European law enforcement agency Europol.
Warning points are used to moderate accounts who do not obey by the simple website rules. In the past we have seen multiple times users do the same thing over and over and over again without any consequences. It took many man hours to deal with few individuals who continued to do things which have not been explicitly disallowed but which affected negatively the productivity of staff.
Netcraft app for
Greenberg managed to interview an impressive number of law enforcement agents, who helped him tell the story of these high-profile investigations from the inside. AlphaBay now only accepts the cryptocurrency Monero, and heavily promotes that users access it via I2P instead of Tor, calling their Tor services “mirrors” to the main I2P eepsite. DeSnake’s detailed instructions for installing I2P on Dread fail to mention the potential risks of peer discovery and de-anonymization through known techniques like Eclipse and Sybil attacks in conjunction with flood-fill takeovers. Interestingly, the last known Monero-I2P-centric market was Liberitas, which went offline in June 2019 after a very short stint on the I2P network. Operation Bayonet, which would ultimately lead to the shutdown of several prominent marketplaces, began with Dutch police seizing another lesser-known market called Hansa Market.
One user openly joked they would stick to purchasing their drugs on social media. DeSnake joined the conversation, creating an account with his moniker on September 12, 2021 in attempts to mitigate the marketplace’s potential reputation damage. DeSnake repeatedly pointed to their vouches from Dread and old PGP key pasted to Ghostbin, paste site. As recently as last year, a California Court sentenced Brian Herrell, a Colorado native and AlphaBay moderator who operated under the moniker “Botah” to 11 years in prison for racketeering and for his connections to AlphaBay. Upon his initial arrest, reports suggested he faced up to 20 years for his involvement in the marketplace.
Dark Web Links
So far, AlphaBay has managed to withstand DDoS attacks, criticism, and skepticism and is well positioned to be a safe haven for increasingly displaced marketplace vendors. A word map of the most popular listings on AlphaBay over the course of the last year. Since its 2021 relaunch, AlphaBay explicitly prohibits the sale of fentanyl, firearms, and COVID-19 vaccines, and the targeting of CIS states. The encrypted-email company, popular with security-conscious users, has a plan to go mainstream. DeSnake tells WIRED, however, that he’s developed a few forms of protection that give him confidence he’ll continue to stay a step ahead of the feds.
At its height, AlphaBay’s daily sales ranged between $600,000 and $800,000 USD across 300,000 listings for illicit goods, offered by over 40,000 vendors and viewed by some 200,000 users. According to our intelligence, the threat actor claims to have source code for all PilotFish Technology products and has made this available for sale on an underground marketplace called AlphaBay. This particular underground marketplace is available in the TOR network and is actively used by cybercriminals for transacting a variety of illegal goods and services, including stolen digital data. As of the writing of this report, this marketplace has more than 90,000 members.
Alphabay Summary
Achieving the Decentralized Market Network project for the entire DNM community is what I have aimed for and that is how AlphaBay will live on forever and the alpha02 legacy honoured. Feel free to search us up on the Internet like Wikipedia or news websites for further information/history. To use social login you have to agree with the storage and handling of your data by this website. AlphaBay’s admin disappeared, the site is potentially exit scamming. Alphabay been unreachable for ovet a week now, even on I2P and private links. I def spent more than 100 bucks but i did not think to look at the private link when the site was up.
- The first half of 2022 was marked by takedowns, shut downs, and exit scams of top markets.
- The FBI seized bitcoins (worth about $33.6 million, at the time) from the site, which were later sold in a series of auctions by the United States Marshals Service .
- Feel free to search us up on the Internet like Wikipedia or news websites for further information/history.
- Fraudsters operating on the AlphaBay darknet market are using phishing attacks to steal login credentials from other criminals.
- This was key because the agents were worried they wouldn’t be able to get evidence from it if it was shut down and encrypted.
- It would keep the market’s original style and layout, but it would also be much better.
The attack was from a single hacker who was paid by AlphaBay for the disclosure. AlphaBay reported that the exploit had only been used in conjunction with this attack and not used previously. Netcraft is in the news today after the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced plans to work with us to develop better automatic defences to reduce the impact of cyber attacks affecting the UK. The stolen credentials are then submitted to a PHP script, which immediately redirects the victim to the genuine AlphaBay hidden service.
Whether vendors and sellers will buy into the new AlphaBay, and how long it might operate before suffering a potential exit scam or law enforcement takedown, only time will tell. As noted, White House Market currently dominates, but other players include ToRReZ and Versus, as well as drug-focused markets, such as CannaHome and Cannazon. The message was signed using a PGP key that DeSnake said he’d previously used to sign AlphaBay communications, and it provided links that individuals could use to verify that assertion. Now, someone has debuted a new AlphaBay, and they claim the impetus is not to cash in on the brand name but rather to carry forward Cazes’ legacy by offering the next generation of darknet marketplaces. The first iteration of AlphaBay ended poorly for its founder, Canadian citizen Alexandre Cazes, who launched the site in December 2014 and ran it from Thailand. For a time, AlphaBay was the most popular darknet market in the world, and Cazes was rich.