Europol announced on Wednesday the dismantling of one of the world’s largest networks of hackers selling stolen data, in a police operation involving 17 countries.
The target was “Genesis Market, one of the most dangerous markets in the world,” European police said in a statement.
The operation, which took place on Tuesday, consisted of simultaneous actions against users of the platform and resulted in 119 arrests and 208 home search warrants.
The investigation had been running since 2019 with the cooperation of the European Cybercrime Center and the Joint Task Force on Cybercrime, both based at Europol.
The dismantling was led by the FBI and the Dutch National Police, who met at the Europol headquarters to coordinate the different actions to be carried out in 17 countries, a group of which Portugal was not a part.
The now dismantled criminal group was considered one of the biggest enablers of cybercrime through the sale of stolen credentials, digital identities and accounts around the world.
The bots, mechanisms that infect electronic devices through computer viruses to collect data, raised by groups, could be later bought by other criminals through two quais teriam accesso digital imprints, dice of automatic pre-filling forms and login information collected in real time.
Genesis Market became a popular resource among ‘hackers’ as it was accessible on the open internet through guest status.
Source: TSF
