
By Emily Wilson, The Next Web
The past year has been one of the most tumultuous for the dark web, as massive law enforcement efforts have untangled and disbanded several large criminal operations — but did these operations actually make a difference?
What happened?
On July 4, 2017, the Amazon of the dark web went dark. Alphabay, the largest underground market ever seen, and a popular shop for drugs, stolen credit cards, counterfeit documents, and cyber-crime kits, was largely considered the bellwether market for the underground economy; Alphabay was steady and reliable — efficiently run and highly organized, with incredible uptime in a world where sites go down multiple times each day.[post_ads_2]
The aftermath
Then, slowly but surely, normalcy returned.Why didn’t the takedowns work?
They did, kinda.Why, then, are the markets still up and running?
If the takedowns were effective, why are criminal communities still thriving online? If this move caused so much initial chaos, why wasn’t it more disruptive long term? Why did everything go back to normal?- The dark web criminal community is not a single entity. Taking down Alphabay is the equivalent of arresting a mob boss (or maybe a consigliere) in a major city: disruptive, effective, but ultimately a single strike. When one operation is taken down, parallel criminal networks abound, undisturbed, and now with a chance to seize a larger segment of the market.
- The takedown only affected certain sectors of the criminal underground. Within the illicit community as a whole, the major factions — drugs, fraud, counterfeits, weapons — often operate independently. The factions that used these major platforms as a home base, like the drug vendors, were at a greater loss when the site went down.
- The distinction between traditional crime and cyber crime is increasingly blurry. The dark web is a distribution platform and an operating hub — a place to develop tradecraft, recruit team members, and hire consultants. These communities undergird the existing operations and provide a centralized system, but they are not the system itself. Cyber crime provides an effective, scalable extension of existing criminal business models.
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