Tag: Dark Web

How Law Enforcement Uses The Dark Web

Have you ever had your identity stolen? If you haven’t, consider yourself lucky. On a daily basis we hear reports of someone stealing a credit card, hijacking bank accounts, or creating false online profiles. One thing is clear: Cyber criminals are constantly trying to steal our personal information…and this information often ends up on a place called the Dark Web.

So what exactly is the Dark Web?

The dark web is a portion of the internet that can only be accessed by using certain browsers and software.

NBC10 Boston Investigators sat down with Andrei Barysevich, the director of advanced collection for Recorded Future, a Somerville-based cyber intelligence company. “You can pretty much find anything,” Barysevich said. “Stolen identities, credit card numbers, compromised data or weapons and drugs.”

In the past two years, Barysevich has gone from a team of one to a team of several dozen cyber intelligence analysts, combing through more than 2 million Dark Web sources per week. His employees, typically fluent in several foreign languages, act like “flies on the wall” in Dark Web online forums, Barysevich said, attempting to gather information about what’s being bought and sold.

On one disturbing site, Barysevich showed NBC10 Boston Investigator Ryan Kath how easy it is to buy the Social Security number of almost anyone in the United States. Using one of Recorded Future’s accounts to pay the $3 charge, Kath plugged in his name. After a search that only took a few seconds, Kath’s personal information appeared on the screen. Barysevich said everyone should assume their information was at one point stolen and is available on the Dark Web.

Christopher Ahlberg, CEO of Recorded Future said, “Cyber security has grown incredibly in the past few years. It’s the idea of being able to catch cyber threats before they hit you. To do that, you need to infiltrate the places that bad guys hang out.” When valuable information is uncovered, Recorded Future shares the details with the pertinent parties, whether it’s a government agency, financial institution or law enforcement. One notable example was when the company spotted a hacker selling sensitive documents about military drones.

Mark Turnage is another investigator who is familiar with the dark web. Turnage’s company, DarkOwl, helps law enforcement and cyber security firms monitor the criminals who lurk in the dark web. “The dark net is appealing to criminals because it completely anonymizes their presence,” Turnage explained. There are no IP addresses. There is no way to trace the person on a keyboard to a physical location. All law enforcement can do is wait for criminals to slip up.

Luckily, that happened in the case against Danny McLaughlin. The Colorado man is accused of attempting to hold a 13-year-old girl captive for sex and trying to hire a hitman to kill his wife. The criminal complaint filed against McLaughlin says his crimes started on the dark web on a site for people who enjoy torture and killing.

McLaughlin was only identified and caught when investigators say he agreed to meet at a Centennial hotel with the person who had agreed to murder his wife. That person was really an undercover detective.

“Thank goodness he made that mistake and was arrested. Had he not gone to that hotel room, it would have been near impossible for them to figure out who this person was,” said Turnage.

Recently, International police group Interpol arrested nine people in Thailand, Australia, and the U.S. and 50 children had been rescued after investigators took down an online pedophilia ring. Police in nearly 60 countries combined efforts in this Interpol operation launched two years ago into a hidden “dark web” site with 63,000 users worldwide. Fifty children were rescued following the arrests.

Interpol said its Operation Blackwrist began after it found material that was traced back to a subscription-based site on the dark web, where people can use encrypted software to hide behind layers of secrecy. Interpol enlisted help from national agencies worldwide, with the US Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) department eventually tracking the site’s IP address, where new photos and videos were posted weekly.

The first arrests came in early 2018, when the site’s main administrator, Montri Salangam, was detained in Thailand, and another administrator, Ruecha Tokputza, was captured in Australia. Salangam, whose victims included one of his nephews, was sentenced in June last year to 146 years in prison by Thai courts. Interpol said children were lured to Salangam’s home with the promise of food, internet access and soccer games.  

One of his associates, a pre-school teacher, got 36 years. Tokputza was handed a 40-year prison term at his trial in Australia last Friday, the longest ever for child sex offences in the country. The Australian Associated Press reported that Tokputza, 31, pleaded guilty to 50 counts of abuse of 11 babies and children — one just 15 months old — between 2011 and 2018. The HSI’s regional attache in Bangkok, Eric McLoughlin, said in the statement that “numerous arrests” had been made in the US. Some held “positions of public trust,” he said, and one individual was abusing his two-year-old stepbrother.

“Operation Blackwrist sends a clear message to those abusing children, producing child sexual exploitation material and sharing the images online: We see you, and you will be brought to justice,” Interpol’s Secretary General Juergen Stock said.

What Can You Do to Avoid the Dark Web?

To reduce your risk of being hacked or having information stolen, Barysevich offers these tips:

• Freeze your credit report, something that can be done for free

• Activate text and email alerts for activity on your bank accounts

• Question why you need to provide a Social Security number or copy of your driver’s license when you visit the doctor, dentist, or other professional office

• Don’t use the same password for multiple online accounts

While some consumers might want to throw up their hands in frustration, Ahlberg — the Recorded Future CEO — said not to give up the fight. The goal is to decrease the odds that you’ll be cyber thieves’ next target.

The Dark Web: What’s New?

Even if you haven’t heard of the term “dark web”, you can probably discern that it’s not a great place to be. 

This anonymous, virtually untraceable area of the internet makes it ripe for illegal activity. 

When you surf the internet, you’re just scratching the surface. “Only about 5% of the internet is actually indexed by search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing,”said Justin Yapp, a PhD student studying cyber security. The other 95% is the “deep web,” with most of the internet unreachable for search engines.

The dark web is an even smaller and more hidden chunk and requires special software — like Tor, which stands for “the onion router.” The name comes from the layers of encryption, which are like the layers of an onion. The information bounces from computer to computer around the world, peeling off encrypted layers until it reaches its destination. It’s anonymous and virtually untraceable — even for law enforcement. “There’s a lot of illegal activity that goes on,” Yapp said. The dark web is notorious for drugs, weapons, child porn and for selling stolen personal information.

Here’s what you should know about dark web websites:

There is bad stuff, and crackdowns means it’s harder to trust

Many dark web marketplaces for drugs and hacking services featured corporate-level customer service and customer reviews, making navigating simpler and safer for newbies. But now that law enforcement has begun to crack down, the experience is more dangerous. “The whole idea of this dark net marketplace, where people are able to review drugs that they’re buying from vendors and get up on a forum and say, ‘Yes, this is real’ or ‘No, this actually hurt me’—that’s been curtailed now that dark marketplaces have been taken offline,” says Radware’s Smith. There are still sites where drugs are reviewed, says Smith, but they have to be taken with a huge grain of salt.

Also, many dark web drug manufacturers will also purchase pill presses and dyes, and create dangerous look-a-like drugs. “One of the more recent scares that I could cite would be Red Devil Xanax,” he said. “These were sold as some super Xanax bars, when in reality, they were nothing but horrible drugs designed to hurt you.”

Smith says that some traditional drug cartels make use of the dark web networks for distribution, “it takes away the middleman and allows the cartels to send from their own warehouses and distribute it if they want to. You know how there are lots of local IPA microbreweries?” he says. “We also have a lot of local micro-laboratories. In every city, there’s probably at least one kid that’s gotten smart and knows how to order drugs on the dark net, and make a small amount of drugs to sell to his local network.”

Not everything is for sale on the dark web

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about drugs here for a reason. Smith calls narcotics “the physical cornerstone” of the dark web; “cybercrime—selling exploits and vulnerabilities, web application attacks—that’s the digital cornerstone. Basically, I’d say a majority of the dark net is actually just drugs and kids talking about little crimes on forums.”

Some of the scarier sounding stuff you hear about being for sale is often just rumors. Firearms, for instance: as Smith puts it, “it would be easier for a criminal to purchase a gun in real life versus the internet. Going to the dark net is adding an extra step that isn’t necessary in the process. When you’re dealing with real criminals, they’re going to know someone that’s selling a gun.”

Some sites seem perfectly innocent

Matt Wilson, chief information security advisor at BTB Security, says “there is a tame/lame side to the dark web that would probably surprise most people. You can exchange some cooking recipes—with video!—send email, or read a book. People use the dark web for these benign things for a variety of reasons: a sense of community, avoiding surveillance or tracking of internet habits, or just to do something in a different way.”

Of course, not everything is so innocent, or else it wouldn’t be found on the dark web. Still, “you can’t just fire up your Tor browser and request 10,000 credit card records, or passwords to your neighbor’s webcam,” says Mukul Kumar, CISO and VP ofCyber Practice at Cavirin. “Most of the verified ‘sensitive’ data is only available to those that have been vetted or invited to certain groups.”

“There are alot of countries that block social media,” Yapp said. Even journalists working to spread content in countries where information is restricted, like China, use the dark web. “I would not recommend anybody go and try it unless they know what they’re doing,” Yapp said.

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