[ISN] Cybercrime Supersite 'DarkMarket' Was FBI Sting, Documents Confirm

From: InfoSec News <alerts_at_private>
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2008 03:20:29 -0500 (CDT)
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/10/darkmarket-post.html

By Kevin Poulsen 
Threat Level
Wired.com
October 13, 2008

DarkMarket.ws, an online watering hole for thousands of identify 
thieves, hackers and credit card swindlers, has been secretly run by an 
FBI cybercrime agent for the last two years, until its voluntary 
shutdown earlier this month, according to documents unearthed by a 
German radio network.

Reports from the German national police obtained by the Südwestrundfunk, 
Southwest Germany public radio, blow the lid off the long running sting 
by revealing its role in nabbing a German credit card forger active on 
DarkMarket. The FBI agent is identified in the documents as J. Keith 
Mularski, a senior cybercrime agent based at the National Cyber 
Forensics Training Alliance in Pittsburgh, who ran the site under the 
hacker handle Master Splynter.

The NCFTA is a non-profit information sharing alliance funded by 
financial firms, internet companies and the federal government. It's 
also home to a seven-agent FBI headquarters unit called the Cyber 
Initiative and Resource Fusion Unit, which evidently ran the DarkMarket 
sting.

The FBI didn't return a phone call Monday.

Like earlier crime sites, DarkMarket allowed buyers and sellers of 
stolen identities and credit card data to meet and do business in an 
entrepreneurial, peer-reviewed environment. Products for sale ran the 
gamut from specialized hardware, to electronic banking logins collected 
from phishing attacks, stolen personal data needed to assume a 
consumer's identity ("full infos") and credit card magstripe swipes 
("dumps), which are used to produce counterfeit cards. Vendors were 
encouraged to submit their goods for review before offering them for 
sale.

[...]


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Received on Tue Oct 14 2008 - 01:20:29 PDT

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