AlphaBay Dark Web Market Goes Down; Users Fear Exit-Scam

AlphaBay Dark Web Market Goes Down; Users Fear Exit-Scam 

AlphaBay Market, one of the largest Dark Web marketplaces for drugs, guns, and other illegal goods, suddenly disappeared overnight without any explanation from its admins, leaving its customers who have paid large sums in panic.

AlphaBay, also known as "the new Silk Road," has been shut down since Tuesday night. The site also came in the news at the beginning of this year when a hacker successfully hacked the AlphaBay site and stole over 200,000 private unencrypted messages from several users.

Although the website sometimes goes down for maintenance, customers are speculating that the admins have stolen all their Bitcoins for good measure, when heard no words from the site's admins on the downtime.

Some users at Reddit and Twitter are claiming that AlphaBay's admins may have shut down the marketplace to withdraw a huge number of bitcoins from the site's accounts.

The withdrawal Bitcoin transactions total 1,479.03904709 Bitcoin (roughly $3.8 Million), which led to suspicion from some users that the site’s admins may have pulled an exit scam to steal user funds.

In March 2015, the largest (at the time) dark web market 'Evolution' suddenly disappeared overnight from the Internet, stealing millions of dollars worth of Bitcoins from its customers.

However, users no need to worry—at least right now when nothing is confirmed, and the timing of the two incidents—site downtime and Bitcoin withdrawals—may be just coincidental.

This is not the first time AlphaBay goes offline. Last year, the site went down for about four days. Also, the blockchain transactions of about $3.8 Million are not enough for AlphaBay moderators to go offline.

One user on Reddit calls for calm and patience, saying "Now I'll admit I don't know for sure what's going on, and I am a bit nervous myself because if this is the end then I've lost a couple of hundred dollars myself But think about it Last year alphabay went down for about 4 days."

"Everyone was saying for sure that this was it, but it was not. It took the alphabay moderators days to update people on what was going on too; they're known to do this. Also about that blockchain transaction.. 44 bitcoins rounds off to about 4 million US. [I don’t know] about you but that doesn't sound like nearly enough money."

While AlphaBay continues to be down, and AlphaBay-associated Redditor who goes by moniker Big_Muscles has called users to calm down, saying the site's servers are under update and will be "back online soon."

Also unlike Silk Road, there is no indication that the law enforcement took down the AlphaBay marketplace.

Silk Road was shut down in 2013 after the arrest of its unassuming founder, Ross William Ulbricht. 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 (USMS).

AlphaBay Market, one of the largest Dark Web marketplaces for drugs, guns, and other illegal goods, suddenly disappeared overnight without any explanation from its admins, leaving its customers who have paid large sums in panic. AlphaBay, also known as "the new Silk Road," has been shut down since Tuesday night. The site also came in the news at the beginning of this year when a hacker successfully hacked the AlphaBay site and stole over 200,000 private unencrypted messages from several users. Although the website sometimes goes down for maintenance, customers are speculating that the admins have stolen all their Bitcoins for good measure, when heard no words from the site's admins on the downtime. Some users at Reddit and Twitter are claiming that AlphaBay's admins may have shut down the marketplace to withdraw a huge number of bitcoins from the site's accounts. The withdrawal Bitcoin transactions total 1,479.03904709 Bitcoin (roughly $3.8 Million), which led to suspicion from some users that the site’s admins may have pulled an exit scam to steal user funds. In March 2015, the largest (at the time) dark web market 'Evolution' suddenly disappeared overnight from the Internet, stealing millions of dollars worth of Bitcoins from its customers. However, users no need to worry—at least right now when nothing is confirmed, and the timing of the two incidents—site downtime and Bitcoin withdrawals—may be just coincidental. This is not the first time AlphaBay goes offline. Last year, the site went down for about four days. Also, the blockchain transactions of about $3.8 Million are not enough for AlphaBay moderators to go offline. One user on Reddit calls for calm and patience, saying "Now I'll admit I don't know for sure what's going on, and I am a bit nervous myself because if this is the end then I've lost a couple of hundred dollars myself But think about it Last year alphabay went down for about 4 days." "Everyone was saying for sure that this was it, but it was not. It took the alphabay moderators days to update people on what was going on too; they're known to do this. Also about that blockchain transaction.. 44 bitcoins rounds off to about 4 million US. [I don’t know] about you but that doesn't sound like nearly enough money." While AlphaBay continues to be down, and AlphaBay-associated Redditor who goes by moniker Big_Muscles has called users to calm down, saying the site's servers are under update and will be "back online soon." Also unlike Silk Road, there is no indication that the law enforcement took down the AlphaBay marketplace. Silk Road was shut down in 2013 after the arrest of its unassuming founder, Ross William Ulbricht. 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 (USMS).

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The Rise of "Onion-Layered" Attacks , IBM Says

"Onion-layered" security incidents have been on the rise throughout 2015, according to the IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Quarterly report for Q4 2015.

Released this week, IBM’s report (PDF) cites four key trends that have been observed this year, with onion-layered and ransomware attacks joined by attacks coming from inside an organization and by an increased management awareness of the need to address security threats proactively.

IBM explains that onion-layered security incidents involve a second, more damaging attack hidden behind a visible one. Usually, these attacks are carried by two actors, namely a script kiddie, an unsophisticated attacker launching highly visible attacks which can be easily caught, and a more sophisticated stealthy attacker who might expand their grip of the victim’s network without being detected for weeks or even months.

"As the name suggests, an 'onion-layered' security incident is one in which a second, often significantly more damaging attack is uncovered during the investigation of another more visible event," the report said.

Such attacks demand large amounts of resources and time to investigate and mitigate, IBM says, given that stealthy attackers use sophisticated tools, are careful to cover their tracks, and use anti-forensic techniques to remain undetected. IBM also notes that anti-virus software alerts about malware on Internet-facing servers, unexpected reboots of servers and other unusual behavior, suspicious log records, and frequent user lockouts are signs that stealthy attackers have infiltrated a network.

Undetected attacks could prove highly damaging to companies, especially if the cybercriminals behind them manage to get hold of valuable data.  

“While the recovery of systems compromised by script kiddie attacks might take only a few days of an operation team’s time and effort, the job of finding a root cause, then fully understanding and remediating the work of the stealthy attackers could take months,” IBM said. Meanwhile, an undetected attacker could roam the network undetected, ultimately trying to gain access to the client’s crown jewels.

Earlier this year, Corero Network Security warned that distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were being leveraged to circumvent cybersecurity solutions, disrupt service availability and infiltrate victim networks.

"The danger in partial link saturation attacks is not the ‘denial of service’ as the acronym describes, but the attack itself," Corero said. "The attack is designed to leave just enough bandwidth available for other sophisticated multi-vector attacks with data exfiltration as the main objective, to fly in under the radar, while the distracting DDoS attack consumes resources."

Based on investigations conducted by Mandiant/FireEye throughout 2014, the median number of days that attackers were present on a victim’s network before being discovered was 205 days.

IBM provided fundamental advice, suggesting that organizations keep systems updated and increase their visibility into the network, as well as build an internal security operations center, create operational procedures, and ensure an appropriate level of logging, in addition to periodically performing penetration testing exercises.

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What is the deep Web?

Did you know that there’s a huge part of the internet that you can’t find simply by Googling it?
In fact, search engines can only account for about 10 % of the total internet. What is the other 90 % that’s out there?  That’s what’s known as the Deep Web.
Deep Web, also known as Deepnet or the Invisible Web, the definition is quite simple, it’s the stuff on the internet that for some reasons cannot be indexed and cannot be reached by traditional search engines. It’s just any page that you simply can’t reach to without having the actual URL and the permissions to access it.

When you look for something on Google, you are actually searching an index as much of the internet as Google has been able to find. Search engines use web crawler software sometimes known as spiders to find and index web pages. They start by finding a few pages at first, then they follow links on those web pages to other web pages and so on until they have a heavy catalogue of the internet. However, there are somethings that those spiders simply can’t reach, this is the Deep Web.

There are a small subsection anonymous networks in the deep web known as the Dark Net and it uses free services such as TOR to browse the web and host websites anonymously. They also provide services that run on the internet but can only be reached through the private network, some of the services have included internet black markets such as silk road where users have to access to drugs, weapons and even assassins.

Also, Dark Web sites go down from time to time, due to their dark nature. But if you want good service, stay out of the dark!

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