"The Dark Web Goes Mobile—and More Untrackable The recent crackdown on popular dark web markets AlphaBay and Hansa is driving cyber-criminals to migrate to messaging apps to carry out their nefarious business...An IntSights Cyber Intelligence threat report, Messaging Applications: The New Dark Web, suggests that apps like Discord, ICQ, Skype, Telegram and Whatsapp offer a convenience mobile platform for criminals, given the availability of group chat... The company estimates that up to hundreds of thousands of users of prominent mobile messaging apps are using them to trade stolen credit cards, account credentials, malware and drugs, as well as exchanging hacking methods and ideas... ...The import of the research is that today’s black market is accessible to anybody with a cell phone, which could lead to a proliferation of low-level cybercrime conducted by amateurs... The report also concluded that the monitoring of online criminal activity will become much more challenging as threat actors move from large and centralized black markets and forums to small, closed and distributed networks based on social media groups and/or messaging apps..." https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/the-dark-web-goes-mobile/
How do we know this Unless I am misunderstanding, intSights, the company whose research this article is based on appear to be associating invites to secure messenging conversations with criminal activity without suggesting any evidence that criminal activity was taking place. I recognize this to be anti privacy propaganda.
"...Hackers are also making use of a messaging app called Discord, which is notorious for malware distribution. IntSights conducted an analysis of invite links, which consists of scraped data found on thousands of black markets, paste sites, hacking forums, IRC channels, messaging apps, and social media pages. The results show a consistent rise in the number of invite links shared on dark web platforms in the past year. By a wide margin, Discord had the most... Traditional networks like TOR are also popping up more on mobile platforms, as evidenced by an increase in installs for ORbot, the TOR mobile application. Moreover, a new Russian black market offers a mobile application for its services..." https://www.intsights.com/blog/are-mobile-messaging-apps-the-new-dark-web All these invites scraped from black markets, paste sites, hacking forums, IRC channels, and Discord and Russian Black Market mobile apps were likely invites to join discussions about The World Series. No ?
