- Joe Teddy
- Cyber security reporter, BBC
image source, BKA
German police say shutting down the infamous website took months of cyber investigations.
“It gave us all goosebumps,” says Sebastian Zwebel, describing the moment his team shut down Hydra, the world’s largest darknet marketplace.
The site has been a hotbed of cybercrime and has operated for more than six years by selling illegal drugs and products.
But after a tip-off, German police confiscated the site’s servers and confiscated 23 million euros ($25 million) of bitcoin.
“We’ve been working on this for months, and when it finally happened it was a really massive feeling,” Zwiebel says.
The police say so 17 million customers and over 19,000 seller accounts They were registered in the market, which now carries a police seizure notice.
Hydra specializes in same-day “black box” services, where drug dealers (vendors) hide packages in public before informing customers of the pickup location.
Shortly after the German operation was announced, the US Treasury issued sanctions against Hydra. A coordinated international effort to stem the spread services to combat harmful cybercrime, dangerous drugs, and other illegal offers available through the Russia-based site.”
image source, BKA
Hydra is written in Russian and has services in many countries.
In the past six months, many prominent dark markets have been closed, but Hydra Looks like he was immune to the police’s attempts to do soREPARHe. She.
The site was launched in 2015 to sell drugs, pirated items, forged documents and illegal digital services like bitcoin shuffling, which cybercriminals use to launder stolen or extorted cryptocurrency.
The site is written in Russian, with sellers located in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and countries in the region.
Zwiebel notes that the site closing process began with a tip that the site’s infrastructure could be hosted in Germany.
“We got some clues by monitoring dark web activity by US officials. So we started in July or August of last year to dig deeper and investigate this area,” he explains.
It was necessary Several months to decide which company can host Hydra In Germany.
He eventually discovered that it was a company called “bullet” hosting.
A bulletproof hosting company is one that does not review the websites or content they host, has no problem hosting criminal websites, and avoids police requests for customer information.
image source, BKA
The site now has a closing notice.
Zwebel says his investigators then took their evidence to a German judge for permission to contact the server company and issue a closure notice.
The company was forced to comply, otherwise they would have been arrested, too.
Visitors to the site are now greeted with a police banner that reads “Platform and criminal content seized.”
While celebrating their success, German authorities say they fear This is not the end of the Hydra Cybercrime Group, Unless they can find and arrest them.
“We know they’re going to find another way to do business. They’ll probably try to build a new platform, and we have to monitor it. We don’t know the culprits, so this is the next step,” Zwiebel says.
This news comes at a turbulent time for darknet markets with some of the most prominent sites shutting down in recent months, either voluntarily or as a result of police activity.
Many of the shutdowns come from criminals who choose to wind down their operations and disappear with their fortunes.
In January, officials of UniCC, a dark website that sells stolen credit card details, pulled out, citing health reasons.
Voluntary closures also ended the White House market in October 2021, Canzon in November, and Torres in December.
However, a BBC investigation earlier this year revealed that the most common way to shut down dark sites is through so-called “exit scams”, in which officials voluntarily shut down sites but steal their customers’ money in the process.
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