Police Arrest Dozens of Suspected Hackers in Genesis Market Takedown
In a big win against cybercrime, the FBI has helped shut down a notorious hacking destination, Genesis Market, resulting in the arrest of dozens of people connected to the site.
The Genesis Market domain was replaced today with a banner announcing the FBI had seized the website. Europol also confirmed(Opens in a new window) the crackdown, saying law enforcement in 17 countries had made 119 arrests along with 208 property searches in connection with the site’s demise.
In the UK alone, police arrested 24 people for their ties to Genesis, the country’s National Crime Agency (NCA) announced(Opens in a new window).
Founded in 2018, Genesis Market not only sold access to stolen passwords, but also the cookies and the digital fingerprints for user login sessions, enabling hackers to beat the two-factor authentication and other safeguards on an online account.
The marketplace sold the information through so-called “bots,” or large groups of computers already infected with malware. The same malware could also extract passwords, cookies, and various attributes of a browser, generating the necessary fingerprint to hijack a login session.
Customers on the invite-only Genesis Market could then buy real-time access to a bot and receive the harvested data—including changes to passwords—to pull off their own hacking schemes. “The price per bot would range from as little as USD 0.70 up to several hundreds of dollars depending on the amount and nature of the stolen data,” Europol says. “The most expensive would contain financial information which would allow access to online banking accounts.”
To facilitate the hacking, Genesis Market also offered a browser plugin that could mimic victim computers ensnared in any of the sold bots.
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