34 ms·

Honour among thieves: the study of a cybercrime marketplace in action

59 points by rustoo 6y ago

55555 6y ago
HackForums is the Chuck E Cheese of cybercrime. Be careful reading too far into this.
- Etheryte 6y ago
  Not only this, but rumor has it that Omni (the original creator of the site) either sold it off or sold root access to a three letter agency years ago.
  - ianhawes 6y ago
    The fact that it’s still around and there is clear evidence of it facilitating illegal activity leads me to believe it is in fact a honeypot run by law enforcement in the US.
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      > The fact that it’s still around and there is clear evidence of it facilitating illegal activity there are plenty of smaller sites like this too with much more blatant illegal behavior
  - joemazerino 6y ago
    Link to the rumor?
    - jlgaddis 6y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25025794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25025794
    - Etheryte 6y ago
      As funny as the comment by jlgaddis is, there is no link, I used to be a mod on the site [0] and that's what I heard through the grapevine some years later. The site's wiki [1] mentions this as well, but I couldn't find a more substantive article: > [Hack Forums] boasts a long span of historical happenings involving major events such as an FBI scandal, members going rogue... [0] https://wiki.hackforums.net/index.php/Etheryte https://wiki.hackforums.net/index.php/Etheryte [1] https://wiki.hackforums.net/index.php?title=Hack_Forums https://wiki.hackforums.net/index.php?title=Hack_Forums
      - joemazerino 6y ago
        It is interesting how rumours spread and that is why I ask always ask for a link.
- nothasan 6y ago
  I agree, however I would say it could be classed as the equivalent of a "gateway drug"
- waihtis 6y ago
  Yes. I bet some news agency or other will run a story based on this, and then I’ll have to hear from laymen how ”cyber criminals actually have a lot of honor in their daily workings.”
  - FDSGSG 6y ago
    Well, that's certainly the case on the more business-oriented forums. People regularly trust each other with hundreds of thousands based on reputation alone.
- datameta 6y ago
  I got a similar vibe from seeing CSS in the banner image. Tough to take the rest of the article seriously upon seeing that...
jimz 6y ago
I feel like what's not explored is that a system such as this with a centralized reputational management system and what seems to be a trade focused on easily reproduced goods of relatively low value means that this really focuses on a particular sort of middleman-aggregator actor with a much more diverse supply-chain and specialization in roles than observed. I mean, they're not exactly selling particularly sophisticated and unique things here, and I can only imagine that reputation maintenance becomes almost a full-time job (i.e. customer service) and the actual acquisition of the goods, however unsophisticated, needs to come from somewhere else. The really interesting thing would be seeing how the supply chains work because really it's the producers and not the salespeople that pose as actual threats that needs to be countered, although it also feels like ultimately this is a marketplace where people are more or less still scamming each other with low-quality high voume goods with a lot of hype.
- iliaishacked 6y ago
  People actually extracted the supply chains from HF before https://damonmccoy.com/papers/ecrime2019.pdf https://damonmccoy.com/papers/ecrime2019.pdf
  - jimz 6y ago
    Just read the report and it was fascinating, but the dataset being from a decade ago from an age of IRC dominance and decenralized markets and before Telegram becoming a huge player, certainly have changed the dynamics somewhere. It'd be interesting to see how that shift has changed things. We can't readily read DMs on, say, telegram, of course,but there are a lot of channel indexers for Telegram that I wonedr if anyone is using to map these things out.
csense 6y ago
So wait, to participate on this forum, you have to leave an online public record of all your criminal transactions that these researchers (and presumably, the prosecutor's office) can simply download? If this site has a significant userbase, I guess that means there must be a lot of stupid criminals out there.

59 points by rustoo 6y ago

55555 6y ago

HackForums is the Chuck E Cheese of cybercrime. Be careful reading too far into this.

Etheryte 6y ago
Not only this, but rumor has it that Omni (the original creator of the site) either sold it off or sold root access to a three letter agency years ago.
- ianhawes 6y ago
  The fact that it’s still around and there is clear evidence of it facilitating illegal activity leads me to believe it is in fact a honeypot run by law enforcement in the US.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    > The fact that it’s still around and there is clear evidence of it facilitating illegal activity there are plenty of smaller sites like this too with much more blatant illegal behavior
- joemazerino 6y ago
  Link to the rumor?
  - jlgaddis 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25025794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25025794
  - Etheryte 6y ago
    As funny as the comment by jlgaddis is, there is no link, I used to be a mod on the site [0] and that's what I heard through the grapevine some years later. The site's wiki [1] mentions this as well, but I couldn't find a more substantive article: > [Hack Forums] boasts a long span of historical happenings involving major events such as an FBI scandal, members going rogue... [0] https://wiki.hackforums.net/index.php/Etheryte https://wiki.hackforums.net/index.php/Etheryte [1] https://wiki.hackforums.net/index.php?title=Hack_Forums https://wiki.hackforums.net/index.php?title=Hack_Forums
    - joemazerino 6y ago
      It is interesting how rumours spread and that is why I ask always ask for a link.
nothasan 6y ago
I agree, however I would say it could be classed as the equivalent of a "gateway drug"
waihtis 6y ago
Yes. I bet some news agency or other will run a story based on this, and then I’ll have to hear from laymen how ”cyber criminals actually have a lot of honor in their daily workings.”
- FDSGSG 6y ago
  Well, that's certainly the case on the more business-oriented forums. People regularly trust each other with hundreds of thousands based on reputation alone.
datameta 6y ago
I got a similar vibe from seeing CSS in the banner image. Tough to take the rest of the article seriously upon seeing that...

jimz 6y ago

I feel like what's not explored is that a system such as this with a centralized reputational management system and what seems to be a trade focused on easily reproduced goods of relatively low value means that this really focuses on a particular sort of middleman-aggregator actor with a much more diverse supply-chain and specialization in roles than observed. I mean, they're not exactly selling particularly sophisticated and unique things here, and I can only imagine that reputation maintenance becomes almost a full-time job (i.e. customer service) and the actual acquisition of the goods, however unsophisticated, needs to come from somewhere else. The really interesting thing would be seeing how the supply chains work because really it's the producers and not the salespeople that pose as actual threats that needs to be countered, although it also feels like ultimately this is a marketplace where people are more or less still scamming each other with low-quality high voume goods with a lot of hype.

iliaishacked 6y ago
People actually extracted the supply chains from HF before https://damonmccoy.com/papers/ecrime2019.pdf https://damonmccoy.com/papers/ecrime2019.pdf
- jimz 6y ago
  Just read the report and it was fascinating, but the dataset being from a decade ago from an age of IRC dominance and decenralized markets and before Telegram becoming a huge player, certainly have changed the dynamics somewhere. It'd be interesting to see how that shift has changed things. We can't readily read DMs on, say, telegram, of course,but there are a lot of channel indexers for Telegram that I wonedr if anyone is using to map these things out.

csense 6y ago

So wait, to participate on this forum, you have to leave an online public record of all your criminal transactions that these researchers (and presumably, the prosecutor's office) can simply download? If this site has a significant userbase, I guess that means there must be a lot of stupid criminals out there.