By: Craig Kennedy
Operation Cookie Monster Takes a Huge Bite Out of The Dark Web
Genesis Marketplace Taken Down
On Tuesday this week, the FBI in collaboration with dozens of law enforcement agencies around the globe shut down Genesis Marketplace, one of the world’s biggest on-line criminal operations on the Dark Web. Genesis was associated with a number of high-profile cyberattacks including the 2021 attack on Electronic Arts, resulting in the loss of source code for its FIFA 2021 game.
The Genesis Marketplace—The eBay of the Dark Web
Genesis Market was launched on the Dark Web in 2018 and packaged and sold what it refers to as “bots”, containing stolen digital identities for a given individual. This information was a collection of usernames and passwords, browser cookies, browser versions, user-agent strings, IP addresses, and other device information for a wealth of different sites. Collectively, this breadth of information was enough for cybercriminals to mimic device fingerprints allowing them to bypass many existing anti-fraud solutions.
The Genesis Marketplace was set up as a full-blown e-commerce store front featuring a dashboard, wiki pages, a news feed, and a sophisticated search engine to identify and select the “bots” that fit the profile of who you were targeting. You could filter on specific items like credit cards and put limits on how much you were willing to spend for this stolen information. You could add items to your cart and then check out with your favorite cryptocurrency. The Genesys Marketplace had a veritable gold-mine of stolen data from over 1.5 million compromised computers providing in excess of 80 million account access credentials. At the time of this raid, there were over 1.5 million bots available for sale.
FBI Takes down Genesis in a Massive Raid
This raid was a massively coordinated effort across 45 FBI Field Offices and law enforcement agencies in 17 other countries. In addition to seizing the Genesis Market site, 11 other domains that supported this criminal activity were seized. This time, law enforcement didn’t just go after the administrators running the site, they targeted the users of the site, resulting in 208 property searches and 119 arrests.
Bottom Line:
Taking out the Genesis Marketplace is the latest win for the good guys, however there are still other brokers of credentials available on the dark web. One big positive outcome from this operation is that the FBI has provided much of the data seized to the popular on-line search engine for compromised accounts Have I Been Pwned?. Thee you can enter your email address and find out whether your personal information was exposed and offered for sale in the Genesis Marketplace.
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