Today, we’re gonna for a detour to another side of cyberspace, showing you just what
the black market economy looks like, pandemic-style.
We’re gonna go for a scavenger hunt on the dark net for coronavirus-related items and
talk about how data breaches and your personal cybersecurity have a lot to do with supporting
underground commerce.
I do NOT recommend you try this at home and actually buy anything from these darknet vendors
for two reasons: one you're probably gonna be scammed out of money and two, you’d also
be supporting criminals and mafia organizations hawking all sorts of other contraband and
likely acquired everything illicitly.
On our shopping list is hand sanitizer, N95 masks, virus test kits, and malaria medication,
which apparently has a lot of controversy on its ability to treat COVID-19.
Let's go!
So first off I’ve just booted up a Linux virtual machine just to be extra safe
navigating these websites, since I can easily revert to a snapshot and clean up.
There’s many types of darknets, like I2P or Freenet, but today I’m gonna look
for our items in the Tor network using the Tor browser with Javascript turned off.
There’s many clearnet sites that mirror a list of .onion URLs on them.
One example is Onion.live, which is a Tor directory
for monitoring and studying .onion hidden services.
It lets cybersecurity professionals track and research darknet websites’ which is
super important if you’re conducting threat intelligence, in order to stay up-to-date
about the latest cybercrime activity and if your organization's data is is being sold
and traded. Not all Tor hidden services are nefarious though.
As you can see, there's some companies like Facebook and DuckDuckGo running services behind
onion URLs too, which is useful for people trying to access their services from countries
with heavy censorship.
Onion.live also lets people report on vendors in these markets who've scammed them, and
illustrates just why you should really think twice before purchasing from them.
If we take a look here, you can see that of over twenty three hundred reports, there’s
only a hundred fifty successful transactions, or about a 6% success rate.
The vast majority of people fell prey to being cheated out of their money.
So I’ve got a KeepassXC database on this VM
containing disposable accounts I've created for several of these
darknet markets, which, be forewarned, peddle a lot of illegal drugs.
One of the more prolific ones is called Empire Market, to which I'll paste the link directly.
All of these sites tend to come with a lot of captchas because of all the automated bots
they get hit with.
We’ll copy and paste the credentials from the password manager to login.
I’m gonna start off searching for n95 masks.
As you can see, vendors are selling them for some wildly ranging prices, from three thousand,
forty six, fifty, or in the hundreds of dollars for a mask.
I’m curious to see what the profile looks like for this citrus gusty seller.
He’s apparently been in business since last summer and has some positive feedback.
He’s based out of the UK and selling lots of prescription products, and trying to limit
his postal runs to once a week.
Some of these vendors will post their email address, Wickr ID, or WhatsApp number for
customer support purposes too.
The high prices for these protection products is typical of black market economics, especially
during shortages.
Next on our shopping list is for a coronavirus test kit, going for forty three dollars a
pop, coming from ThreeKings, who accepts Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero, as payment, which allow
for pseudo-anonymous transactions.
He’s shipping out of Europe and has much higher ratings than the last guy.
You’ll see a lot of what’s sold coming from different countries around the world,
which shows how supply chains in the digital underworld have globalized too.
Let’s check out the malaria medicine, chloroquine,
which have been used to treat coronavirus patients.
It looks like these listings are going in the hundreds per pack.
This particular vendor uses keyword stuffing for other meds like Remdesivir on this listing,
increasing the odds of showing up in a search.
Last up on our list is hand sanitizer, which is also in short supply.
And they are listed, which suggests that darknet vendors will sell just about anything for
a big mark-up price because of shortages due high demand or government restrictions.
So I hopped over to some of the other darknet markets to see what kind of pandemic protection
gear is being offered there as well.
Searching for “coronavirus" brought up this Singaporean vendor selling a 25 piece pack
of test kits for three hundred ninety four dollars.
When I look at this picture, the packaging is sold by Anhui DeepBlue Medical Technology Co,
which is an actual business in China that sells fertility and cancer test kits.
So I dug a bit deeper and apparently an emergency room in Laredo Texas spent five hundred thousand
dollars on this exact kit from the same company, with the help of a Texas congressman.
The issue is that these antibody tests only had about 20% accuracy for COVID-19, so this
was an unfortunate half a million bucks down the drain for this city.
There’s also coronavirus tests coming from a vendor out of Germany.
The package says it’s made by SolGent Co Ltd, which is a South Korean company.
What this might tell us is that somewhere along traditional supply chains, third parties
have been able to divest some portion of the goods to profiteer from high-demand
medical products through these darknet markets.
Or that scammers are exploiting the high demand search to build fake listings.
An obvious example is this coronavirus detector selling for a thousand dollars but is actually
a baby thermometer, whose picture appears on other clearnet websites.
So as you can see, we've been able to find all sorts of COVID19-related items being hawked
right next to your usual contraband.
If you think showcasing this little darknet dive is a bit reckless, think again.
Just as much of our everyday lives have gone digital, so have the stereotypical gangsters,
robberies, con men, and dark alleyways.
When individuals and companies have their credit card numbers, bank info, email addresses,
and passwords compromised in a public data breach or scam campaign, the data often ends
up being resold on marketplaces to convert them into cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or
Monero.
The attackers can then use the cryptocurrency to buy computer exploit kits, drugs, or other
goods and services.
Rinse and repeat.
If you have a phone, a computer, or online account, congratulations, you are just another
participant in this digital jungle.
Your personal cybersecurity has a direct impact
on the financial security of yourself and others.
Becoming healthier with your habits and more sophisticated a countering the threats makes
you a much more resilient and low risk of a target for adversaries on the web.
So that’s it for this episode.
Share this video with friends and families if you think it’s a good wake up call.
Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more videos down the road.
Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you soon!