Europol and FBI take down cybercriminal site RaidForums
© DR
Text by: Dominique Desaunay Follow
2 mins
Europol, the European Criminal Police Agency and the US Department of Justice announced on Tuesday April 12 the closure of RaidForums, one of the main marketplaces for cybercrime.
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It was an international police operation called Tourniquet that made it possible to arrest the managers of the most important site for the resale of pirated data.
Extensive investigations by cyber investigators from the UK, US, Germany, Sweden, Portugal and Romania have led to the total dismantling of this criminal platform.
RaidForums sold stolen databases belonging to a number of American companies in free access.
The network infrastructure was seized and the platform administrator and two of his accomplices were arrested, says the
Europol
site .
The flourishing business of data traffic on RaidForums appeared in 2015. And very quickly, this site gained international notoriety, due to the ease with which its users retrieved stolen information.
Anyone, in fact, could get them for a sum of money, of course, and preferably in virtual currency such as bitcoin.
Data traffic
These fraudulent databases contained information "
on millions of credit cards, bank account numbers and associated passwords in order to siphon them off
," Europol said in its statement.
The RaidForums hacker brotherhood claimed a community of more than 750,000 active members on its platform, according to investigators.
The site is now offline.
“
For now
!
add some cybercrime experts who doubt the effectiveness of Operation Tourniquet.
If the home page of the site does indeed display the image of a warning informing visitors that the platform's computer servers have been seized and that its internet addresses have been blocked, it is impossible to certify that RaidForums will not be reborn from his ashes.
It may very well be reactivated one day soon by the other members of this pirate community.
An endless hunt
This is the second shutdown of an online criminal marketplace in a matter of days.
On April 6, the German police announced the dismantling of
Hydra Market
, a platform run by Russian speakers which allowed several million subscribers to buy drugs, false papers and other illicit products.
For the record, the name Hydra is a direct reference to that of the organization of "villains" found in the Marvel films.
But in the world of the computer underworld, the reality is more worrying: less than a week after the site was closed, we find that a file containing all the information on the customers who visited this malicious online store is already circulating. in line.
These data sold to the highest bidder will undoubtedly allow other pirates to regenerate the platform which will then bear a different name.
► To read also: Darknet: dismantling of the “largest” global sales site
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