Dark Web: Hydra Market, has been shut down

German investigators shut down and confiscated the servers of a popular service for trading in various illegal products and services, and seized as many as 543 bitcoins related to these activities.

The German Central State Office for the Fight against Cybercrime ZIT announced that it had carried out an operation to shut down the world's largest illegal market on the dark web, Hydra Market, in cooperation with the federal criminal police. 

The police operation found and confiscated the servers of this market, which were located in Germany, and together with the organizers of the illegal market, 543 bitcoins were seized, with a total value of around 23 million USD.

Millions of users and billions of USD in turnover

This action is the result of several months of investigations conducted by ZIT together with American investigators, since August last year. The illegal Hydra Market operated primarily in Russia and has existed since at least 2015. Like other content from the dark web, it was accessed via the Tor network and the associated browser.

Through this platform, traders offered mostly narcotics, various stolen private data, forged documents as well as illegal digital services such as money laundering through cryptocurrencies. At the time of the shutdown, over 19,000 merchant accounts and about 17 million customer accounts were registered on the Hydra Market.

German investigators estimated that this was also the largest gathering place of its kind in the world, as well as the illegal darknet market with the largest total traffic. In 2020 alone, trade worth 1.23 billion USD was realized there. 

Allegedly, money laundering stolen from the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange in 2016 was agreed through this market, as well as funds extorted by the hacker group DarkSide by ransomware by attacking the American Colonial Pipeline pipeline last year.

The biggest robbery of any DeFi platform so far

Last week, hackers attacked the decentralized financial (DeFi) platform Ronin Network, developed for Axie Infinity, a game that uses a blockchain system. 

In that attack, the payment system of this network was compromised, and the attackers managed to steal a huge amount of cryptocurrencies in two transactions: 173,600 ETH (worth less than $ 600 million) and another $ 25.5 million in coins, worth the same amount.