FEATURE - Darknet Market Operators Undeterred Despite Operation Dark HunTor's Success

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 23rd November, 2021) Despite international law enforcement agencies hailing their success in taking down a number of popular illicit markets on the Darknet through Operation Dark HunTor, operators of remaining markets told Sputnik that the crackdown had little impact on their operations.

Operation Dark HunTor, a collaboration between the US Department of Justice and Europol, grabbed international headlines in late October, leading to 150 arrests globally, with the seizure of weapons and drugs and over $31 million in illicit funds.

Authorities in Germany and Italy shut down several popular markets on the Darknet, including the DarkMarket, the Berlusconi Market and the DeepSea Market. The confiscation of servers of those markets allowed law enforcement agencies to track down more vendors and buyers on those platforms.

However, despite the closure of those raided markets, the market space on the Darknet appeared to continue to boom as users simply fled to other markets that were still accessible.

On the page in the Dread forum, where top Darknet markets are featured in a "superlist," a total of 12 markets continued to appear to be business as usual.

When reached by Sputnik, the administrators of several markets agreed to share their views on the impact of the raids under Operation Dark HunTor. Most of them believed the raids would not discourage them from continuing to operate their markets, as they viewed the arrest of fellow administrators as the result of human errors.

One of the most popular sections on the Dread forum is called OpSec, which means Operational Security. The section is filled with detailed tutorials on how to use anonymizing services such as Tor, PGP key and portable operation systems like Tails to hide the user's identity.

William Gibson, an administrator of the Versus Market who only wished to be identified by his pseudonym, said he didn't believe law enforcement agencies had found new methods in tracking down market operators on the Darknet.

"Not at all. They are still trying to get vendor and operator by following the money and by traditional police work such as narrowing down where vendors send their packages from by repeatedly buying from them and tracing the packages back to its origin. It is very unlikely that they use 0days in Tor to deanonymize operator/vendor or that they use any other sophisticated technique not known to us. Markets of course can make mistakes while setting up their servers and unwillingly reveal their IP's which makes it easy for law enforcement to find them. While this kind of things happen, I would guess most vendor and market operator are being caught because law enforcement follows the money. This is the one point of failure where even the most sophisticated anonymous online activity can be linked to real life identities and the best chance for law enforcement to get to their targets," Gibson told Sputnik.

Nevertheless, Gibson noted that the recent success of Operation Dark HunTor showed that law enforcement agencies around the world began to under the Darknet market place better.

"Law enforcement is now better funded, more capable and more experienced investigating this kind of online activity. A few years back they had no idea what Tor or cryptocurrencies is or how markets work. For a long time, they underestimated the role of Darknet markets in the international drug trade and while it still is small in comparison to the offline trade it becomes bigger and bigger by the day due to the many advantages over the offline trade," he said.

One of the new tools the Guardia di Finanza used in Italy was the analytic platforms that can track bitcoin transactions.

In response, the team behind the Incognito Market started to offer a new service named Antinalysis, which is a publicly available blockchain analysis tool that allows users to check if their bitcoin addresses had been targeted by authorities.

"We consider ourselves advocates, our team additionally provides Antinalysis and Sector.City (a privacy mail service) that we hope will help users preserve their freedom, anonymity and privacy," an administrator of the Incognito Market, who only wished to be identified as Pharoah, told Sputnik.

Gibson from the Versus Market argued that the efforts from law enforcement agencies could only turn into a cat-and-mouse game as long as demands for such products remained high.

"At the end of the day every bust only creates more markets. For every market they shut down a few new markets rise. A battle they can't win. Look at how many markets there are right now. Last time I checked it was more than 20 and there are new market popping up all the time," he said.

The administrator also offered a different view on what purpose the Darknet could serve.

"On a completely different note, I want to mention that the Darknet is not all about drugs and cybercrime even if it might look like that on the first glance. There are a lot of people who simply feel better to talk about certain things on the Darknet because they can't do it anywhere else for a bunch of different reasons. The Darknet is also a place where it doesn't matter who you are, what your sex is, which color your skin has or what imaginary friends you believe in. In a hyper socialized world where people usually are reduced to their online presence the Darknet is a place to be just yourself," he said.

In many aspects, the Darknet mirrors the early days of the internet before social media and monetization of user data "destroyed everything" and made the internet what it is today, he added.