This week, law enforcement and judicial authorities worldwide have taken down the most prolific English-speaking cybercriminal forum to date: Darkode. In an international coordinated action against the hacking forum and its users, investigators from all over the world targeted cybercriminals that were using the Darkode forum to trade and barter their hacking expertise, malware and botnets, and to find partners for their next spam runs or malware attacks.
The operation was led by the FBI and supported by Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), with the involvement of law enforcement officers from 20 countries in and outside the European Union. The takedown and arrests were coordinated from command posts set up by the FBI (Pittsburgh, USA) and Europol’s EC3 (The Hague, the Netherlands).
