Genesis Market, a notorious online platform believed to be one of the world’s largest marketplaces for stolen identities, has been taken down in an international operation, according to the law enforcement agencies involved.
The investigation, dubbed Operation Cookie Monster, was led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Dutch National Police, involving an international coalition of law enforcement agencies from 18 countries. The cybercrime venue was taken down on Tuesday and now displays a banner announcing its domains have been seized by the FBI. It held about 11 domain names, all of which have been shut down.
The website advertised and sold packages of online credentials based on locations such as usernames and passwords for emails, bank accounts, and social media, according to a statement by the US Justice Department. The stolen datasets were obtained from computers that had been infected with malware.
The US government officials have termed Genesis Market one of the two largest platforms (the other being BreachForums taken down in March) for the sale and purchase of hacked access credentials with an advanced infrastructure. The marketplace reportedly impacted individuals, businesses, and governments around the world. Around 1.5 million computers were attacked as a result of malicious activities carried out on Genesis Market since its launch in 2018.
The combination of stolen access credentials, fingerprints, and cookies allowed purchasers to assume the identity of the victim by tricking third party websites into thinking they were the actual owners of the comprised accounts, the statement added.
Genesis Market held 80 million sets of personal credentials, which covered two million people worldwide. Information belonging to Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Paypal accounts and digital fingerprints scraped off vulnerable devices were also available for sale on the notorious platform. It could easily be located in regular internet searches, and users were even offered details as to how the stolen data could be bought and deployed for fraud.
Globally, around 200 searches were launched, which resulted in the arrest of 120 people associated with the online black market. The NCA has detained 19 suspected users of the website in the UK alone.
“Genesis Market is one of the top criminal access marketplaces anywhere in the world,” said Will Lyne, the cyberintelligence head at the NCA. “Genesis Market is an enormous enabler of fraud and a range of other criminal activity online by facilitating that initial access to victims, which is a critical part of the business model in a whole range of nefarious activity.”
An online portal has been set up for users to check whether their personal information has been advertised or sold on the platform.
