Rowley noticed chatter on forums and subreddits pointing to Dream Market as the next AlphaBay, but people are wary after the Dutch police ploy. Fueled by Tor browsers and cryptocurrencies that offer anonymity, AlphaBay, Hansa and other sites avoided much government detection, allowing online drug sales to triple in the wake of Silk Road’s demise. DarkOwl has assigned assets to monitoring and collecting data from the new AlphaBay Marketplace, leveraging our darknet intelligence capabilities, despite their increased crawler detection measures and ongoing server instability. Our analysts will continue to follow this market’s presence and reputation on the darknet, and provide further updates as this story unfolds. During this research, DarkOwl discovered a surface web domain that mirrors much of the information DeSnake shared on Dread, but with a Tor link to the market that is not in the mirrors.txt verified links list from AlphaBay.
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AlphaBay was a prominent darknet marketplace that operated from 2014 until its takedown by law enforcement in July 2017. The platform quickly gained notoriety for facilitating the sale of a wide range of illicit goods and services, including drugs, counterfeit items, stolen data, and hacking tools. At its peak, AlphaBay was considered the largest and most influential darknet market, boasting tens of thousands of active listings and a user base that spanned the globe. The marketplace facilitated anonymous transactions through the use of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Monero, and Ethereum, making it difficult for authorities to trace the parties involved in the trades.
This allowed for “the covert monitoring of criminal activities on the platform” until it was eventually shut down a month later. “We know of several Americans who were killed by drugs on AlphaBay,” said US Attorney General Jeff Sessions. It was a “landmark” operation, according to US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) acting director Andrew McCabe. Though the creator and administrator of AlphaBay was arrested, his second in command, known as “DeSnake” was still active.
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As such, they are normally under intense scrutiny from law enforcement and security professionals alike. AlphaBay facilitated the sale of illegal drugs, and was linked to multiple overdose deaths. It also enabled fraud and identity theft, leaving victims with financial losses and personal damage. Participating or operating on this marketplace involved serious risks, from legal consequences to real-world harm. The layout was clean and easy to navigate, with dropdown menus and filter options that helped users find what they wanted quickly.
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DeSnake’s operational security tactics for the new AlphaBay 2.0, like the sole use of Monero and I2P, both of which have been implemented for their increased anonymity, are generally less popular and create a barrier to entry for existing darknet vendors. Other marketplaces like White House Market, Dark0de Reborn, and World Market have all experienced a high level of success as they have been able to amass tens of thousands of listings respectively. Thus far, this iteration of AlphaBay has been met with skepticism among the threat actor community. In addition to the marketplace feature, DeSnake said AlphaBay will also have a forum section.
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Some have been busted by law enforcement, like Dark Market, which was the target of a Europol-led takedown operation early last year; or Hydra, the massive Russian-language drug and money-laundering market whose servers were seized in a law enforcement raid in April. Others, like Dark0de and World Market, are believed to have pulled “exit scams,” disappearing suddenly with their users’ money. Still others, like Cannazon and White House Market, staged more considerate and organized exits, giving users time to pull out any funds held on the sites. The new AlphaBay is claimed to be run by the other administrator, a threat actor operating under the alias DeSnake. In order to prevent users from losing money to similar seizures, DeSnake said they have created a system called “AlphaGuard” which would allow threat actors operating on the forum to withdraw funds even if all servers are seized.
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“You do not shit where you sleep,” he writes of AlphaBay’s rule against selling the stolen data of ex-Soviet citizens. “We did that for security of other staff members. Cazes decided to embrace it as a way to secure himself.” The convergence of new, third-generation markets upon the dark web represents a paradigm shift in how goods are bought and sold on the dark web.
Initially, the platform offered a limited range of products, including drugs and stolen credit card information. In addition to Empire Market’s more than 18,000 drug listings, another site called Nightmare Market now lists 28,000 drug products, along with the dark web’s usual assortment of stolen credit card numbers, counterfeits, and hacking tools. A new, Reddit-style forum site called Dread, hosted on a Tor hidden service, has already replaced the seized DeepDotWeb as a community hub, where users discuss which site to use when one is taken down by police or turns out to be run by scammers.
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A kind of practical paranoia permeated DeSnake’s messages to WIRED, both on a personal level and in his plans for AlphaBay’s revamped technical protections. AlphaBay’s dark web site is now accessible not only via Tor, like the original AlphaBay, but also I2P, a less popular anonymity system that DeSnake encourages users to switch to. He repeatedly described his wariness that Tor may be vulnerable to surveillance, though he provided no evidence. In an extended chat interview, DeSnake tells WIRED how he walked away unscathed from the takedown of AlphaBay, why he has resurfaced now, and what his plans are for the resurrected, once-dominant online black market. He communicated with WIRED via encrypted text messages, from a frequently changing series of pseudonymous accounts, after proving his identity by signing a public message with DeSnake’s original PGP key, which multiple security researchers verified. “Satisfied customer, will be back,” writes one user on the product page of a meth dealer with the handle shardyshardface.
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- Today’s cybercriminals spread their activities across multiple platforms, making them harder to track and shut down.
- Only those with administrative access such as DeSnake had the ability to disable it, by entering a key within 72 hours.
- The ultimate goal would be to createa fully anonymous market and network that would be “near impossible” for law enforcement to take down.
- The term “dark web” first entered the popular vernacular with the inception and eventual fall of Silkroad in 2013.
Other users noted that it still wasn’t clear how AlphaBay had been seized, given that its use of Tor and Bitcoin were meant to shield buyers, sellers, and admins from identification. For months, an extortionist had reportedly threatened to reveal the identity of one AlphaBay administrator, and even released identifying information about him after AlphaBay’s proctors sent him or her a hush-money payment. But dark web practitioners still have vague fears that law enforcement agencies found a method of breaking AlphaBay’s Tor protection–which potentially means sites like Dream Market and Hansa are vulnerable too. “It is frankly frightening,” one user wrote in response to news of the AlphaBay takedown. AlphaBay’s quick growth—or regrowth—has been fueled in part by what Gray calls “the Great Cyber Resignation.” At least 10 dark web markets have dropped offline for various reasons in the last 18 months.
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Hours short of his scheduled extradition from Thailand to the United States, Cazes took his own life. Cazes had accumulated over $35 million in assets, which he split between multiple offshore accounts. Thai authorities seized the servers hosting AlphaBay, and cut off access to users, but did not publicly announce the closure or takeover of the platform. The rumours this incited among the malicious actors on dark web forums ranged from technical issues, to exit scams in which dark web marketplace administrators shut down the platform and to steal the users’ money. On August 6, 2021, former AlphaBay security administrator “DeSnake” announced that AlphaBay Market had relaunched.
Despite its shutdown, AlphaBay made a brief reappearance in 2021 before being permanently taken down in 2023. According to another complaint affidavit filed in the Middle District of Florida against Jeremy Achey, an investigation into a fentanyl overdose death in Orange County, Florida, on February 27, 2017, revealed that the lethal substance was purchased on AlphaBay from Achey. By comparison, the infamous SilkRoad had a little over 950,000 users and about 14,000 listings, most of them for drugs. It transacted 9.5 million bitcoins in two-years time, valued at $1.2 billion at the time. Flashpoint researchers note that the rule restricting activity related to former Soviet Union countries is typical for threat actors based in those regions, to avoid scrutiny from local law enforcement.
