What could be the world’s largest illegal marketplace on the dark web has been taken offline in an international operation involving law enforcement agencies in Australia, Denmark, Germany, Moldova, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the USA. 

At the time of its closure, DarkMarket had almost half a million users and more than 2,400 vendors selling a broad range of illicit merchandise. Among the goods advertised for sale were stolen credit card details, illegal drugs, counterfeit money, anonymous SIM cards, and malware. 

At least 320,000 transactions were carried out via the marketplace, involving the transfer of more than 4,650 bitcoin and 12,800 monero (a sum equivalent to more than $170m). Because of its location on the dark net, DarkMarket was accessible only to internet users with specialized identity-cloaking tools.

The Central Criminal Investigation Department in Oldenburg, Germany, took down the site and turned off its servers on Monday. The shutdown followed the weekend arrest near the German–Danish border of a 34-year-old Australian citizen who is the alleged operator of the site.

German prosecutors in the cities of Koblenz and Oldenburg said on Tuesday that they had shut down what was “probably the largest illegal marketplace on the Darknet.”

In a statement released today, Europol said: “The investigation, which was led by the cybercrime unit of the Koblenz Public Prosecutor’s Office, allowed officers to locate and close the marketplace, switch off the servers and seize the criminal infrastructure—more than 20 servers in Moldova and Ukraine—supported by the German Federal Criminal Police office (BKA).

“The stored data will give investigators new leads to further investigate moderators, sellers, and buyers.”

German authorities say the probe that uncovered DarkMarket was the result of a months-long joint effort by international law enforcement agencies. The law enforcement action against DarkMarket sprung from a larger investigation that saw the takedown of website hosting provider CyberBunker in southwestern Germany in September 2019.

The DarkMarket taken down over the weekend is separate from an earlier dark web marketplace, Darkmarket, that was shut down in 2008 after an FBI agent infiltrated it. 

Social media company Twitter has cited the recent protests at the United States’ Capitol building in its decision to permanently suspend tens of thousands of user accounts. 

On January 6, protestors forced their way into the Capitol building, interrupting a Joint Session of Congress in which the results of the 2020 US presidential election were being certified. Five people died in the violent assault.  

In a blog post uploaded late on Monday night, Twitter announced that it had suspended 70,000 user accounts associated with the QAnon movement.

“Given the violent events in Washington, DC, and increased risk of harm, we began permanently suspending thousands of accounts that were primarily dedicated to sharing QAnon content on Friday afternoon,” stated Twitter.

“These accounts were engaged in sharing harmful QAnon-associated content at scale and were primarily dedicated to the propagation of this conspiracy theory across the service.”

Among the circulated images of individuals who stormed the Capitol was a photo of Jake Angeli, a well-known supporter of QAnon who refers to himself as the QAnon Shaman. 

QAnon followers hold a series of beliefs widely discredited as conspiracy theories, one of which is that President Donald Trump is fighting against a group of prominent Democrats, Hollywood elites, and “deep state” allies who engage in the sexual abuse of children.

The movement began in 2017 with some posts on the message board 4chan by an individual who signed themselves “Q.” 

In August 2020, Facebook removed or restricted over 10,000 groups, pages, and accounts across the social network and Instagram linked to QAnon as part of a move to crack down on “militia organizations and those encouraging riots, including some who may identify as Antifa.”

YouTube has removed tens of thousands of QAnon videos. In October 2020, the company announced that it had expanded its hate and harassment policies to prohibit content that targets an individual or group with conspiracy theories that have been used to justify real-world violence. 

“One example would be content that threatens or harasses someone by suggesting they are complicit in one of these harmful conspiracies, such as QAnon or Pizzagate,” said YouTube.

A well-known Muslim prayer app has been recording and selling the location data of users, leading to fears this information will be abused.

This is according to a report by Vice, which said granular location data from Salaat First, an app that reminds Muslim users of when to pray, is being sold to a data broker who in turn sells it on to other clients.

The data broker, Predicio, has been linked to a supply chain of data involving a US government contractor that has worked with security agencies including Customs and Border Protection and the FBI.

The story emerged after a large dataset of raw, precise movements of app users was obtained by Motherboard. The leaked data contained users’ precise latitude and longitude, their phone model, operating system, IP address, a timestamp and their unique advertising ID.

Such information could potentially be used to track the day-to-day movements of Muslims, such as when they visit their places of worship.

Vice stated that the developer behind Salaat First, which has been downloaded more than 10 million times on Android, confirmed to them that the app sent users’ location data to Predicio. While the privacy policy on Salaat First’s website does mention it shares anonymized location data with third parties for “ads and to improve our services,” there is no mention the app sells users’ location data itself.

Since the story was published, Predicio released a statement on its website saying: “Predicio does not support any governmental, commercial, or private use cases that aim to use business intelligence data to identify ethnic, religious or political groups for human tracking or people identification of any sort. We do not tolerate the abuse of our solutions for the use cases that do not follow our global moral, social and ethical code of conduct.”

As quoted by Vice, Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations, said: “In light of these latest revelations, the owners of all major Muslim applications should thoroughly investigate how their companies handle user data. The companies should publicly acknowledge any identified sale of user data that could have been obtained by government entities, and then take transparent steps to ensure that it never happens again.”

Rivals of messaging service WhatsApp are experiencing a surge in popularity following the app’s announcement of a new data-sharing agreement with parent company Facebook.

On January 6, WhatsApp informed its users outside the UK and European Union that they would lose access to their accounts on February 8 unless they agreed to let Facebook and its subsidiaries collect WhatsApp data that includes users’ phone numbers, contacts’ phone numbers, and locations.

Two years after WhatsApp was purchased by Facebook in 2014, users were given a one-time opportunity to opt out of sharing their data with Facebook. A spokesperson for Facebook told The Register that while this 2016 opt-out decision will be honored going forward, other users will not be offered the same choice over whether to share their data with Facebook.

In the days following WhatsApp’s announcement, data gathered by app-analytics firm Sensor Tower revealed a 4,200% week on week increase in downloads of rival encrypted messaging service Signal. 

“From January 6 to January 10, Signal saw approximately 7.5 million installs globally from across the App Store and Google Play,” a Sensor Tower representative told Business Insider.

Over the same period, another encrypted messaging service, Telegram, experienced a growth of 91%, attracting 9 million new users. 

The majority of new users of both apps were located in India, where 2.3 million installations of Signal and 1.5 million downloads of Telegram took place.

America, where around 1 million downloads occurred, accounted for Signal’s second-biggest market. 

Signal was recently endorsed by the world’s richest man, Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, who posted a tweet to his 42 million followers on January 7 that simply read “Use Signal.” On the same day, Freedom of the Press president Edward Snowden tweeted that he uses Signal every day. 

The sudden increase in downloads caused a temporary slow-down of Signal’s verification service.

On January 7, Signal tweeted: “Signal Verification codes are currently delayed across several providers because so many new people are trying to join Signal right now (we can barely register our excitement). We are working with carriers to resolve this as quickly as possible. Hang in there.”

More than two-thirds (68%) of UK workers do not consider the cybersecurity impact of working from home, according to a new study by VPNOverview.com.

The survey of 2043 employees in the UK demonstrated a lack of awareness about how to stay secure whilst working remotely, which is putting businesses at risk of attacks. The shift to home working as a result of COVID-19 means that staff in many organizations are operating across insecure devices and networks, providing opportunities for cyber-criminals.

Although 71% of workers do not think about the implications a cybersecurity breach could have on their work and job security, when asked, 45% said they could lose their job if their working device’s security was compromised.

VPNOverview calculated that home workers are risking an average of £2100 in company hardware and unnamed sums in company data by not undertaking basic security practices. These include not having password protection for working devices (34%), leaving working devices in plain view of windows (32%), not using password-protected Wi-Fi while working from home (26%) and not operating on secured servers, databases or cloud systems (24%).

The industries in which the highest rates of cybersecurity errors were made were manufacturing and utilities (65%), construction and engineering (61%) and recruitment (57%).

In addition, 17% of all employees polled admitted to breaking confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) by discussing work matters with friends and family.

David Janssen, security researcher and founder, VPNOverview.com, commented: “It’s worrying to see how many workers aren’t taking into consideration their security and cybersecurity, even after almost a year of working from home. With home working unlikely to end any time soon, and a lot of business committing to a hybrid working system when offices can reopen, ensuring these security systems are in place is vital for workers and businesses alike.”

“Businesses and employees need to work together to ensure they are taking the necessary precautions to keep their work devices protected from attacks – by using passwords, secured servers and VPN networks – to make sure jobs are not unintentionally being put at risk.”