BLOG

The Dark Web isn’t so Dark Anymore

We’ve all heard about the Dark Web. That corner of the Internet not routinely indexed by search engines and generally unreachable without specific links or configuration info to reach it. The deep Dark Web and what danger lurks in its corners have been the subject of multiple books and movies.  A substantial number of companies make their money by routinely scouring the Dark Web for stolen information or to warn their customers of stolen data for sale from a breach they may be unaware of.

The Dark Web is part of the criminal marketplace and the legitimate marketplace.

Well, the Dark Web really isn’t all that dark anymore. Although it is a place to make money from all sorts of nefarious activities, there are online guides to help the courageous to get inside on their own using VPNs. Conversely, making money from nefarious activity has begun to spill into the normal Internet with shocking effectiveness.

One of the larger and more lucrative parts of the e-criminal marketplace is trading in stolen identities and user profiles; keys sold and bought by criminals, for criminals. The goal is to take over legitimate accounts or create new accounts, stealing billions of dollars each year. This nefarious activity is fueled by phishing campaigns.

Not many years ago, the primary means of stealing identities took some effort to create a believable spoofed website and then to lure victims to these sites with phishing emails. Naturally, these tedious tasks would be replaced by automation. New phishing kits allow anyone without deep technical skills to launch their own phishing campaigns. The infrastructure these kits created have grown phishing to unimaginable proportions. Of course, the criminals would monetize their hard effort and sell these kits on the Dark Web.

Like any software marketplace, the key to successfully monetizing your product is reaching a larger audience who might be interested in buying your software.

Enter “www.fudsender.com”, yes, a site that sells scam materials to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Exactly the ingredients you need to trick people into falling for your scam. The site provides a wide range of scam materials including scam email templates, a variety of scams leveraging popular cloud services including Dropbox and office365. Even providing checkers to validate the ill-gotten gains from successful campaigns. All the essentials you need to enter the e-criminal business with little to no effort. It is pretty amazing how openly brazen the anonymous owners of the site really are. But perhaps it was inevitable.

The bad guys have no fear of being caught.

They monetize every aspect of their infrastructure for scamming, stealing, and cheating. It certainly is a wild Internet. Once hidden in the Dark Web, sites like this and their competitors “http://fudtool.ru” are now open to the public. Just google search and there they are in plain sight.  They even know how to properly leverage SEO to sell their scam programs.

Scamming is big business. Very big business. And it certainly will get even bigger.