Dark Net v. Law Enforcement — who is winning and who is struggling.
The Dark web is a privileged place for cyber criminals that, under specific conditions, could operate in anonymity.
The United Nation’s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has published its annual report that contains a specific mention to the illicit trade of goods and drugs in this hidden part of the web.
The crooks seem to be one step ahead many countries’ law enforcement agencies that in many cases are not able to target black markets in the dark web.
The internet has always been the most preferred platform for carrying out illicit activities. The underground black markets are not a new phenomenon in the virtual world. However, these black markets are now becoming more sophisticated and organized. Darkness is one such underground marketplaces which are rising and becoming uglier. Though law enforcement agencies have brought down the number of such illegal platforms, the Darknet markets are up and running. Darknet markets are growing bigger than ever with over $50 million UDS transactions reportedly flowing through these marketplaces and it is a big challenge in front of security agencies and governments to finish this underground industry from its roots.
Decoding Darknet
As the name suggests, the Darknet market, also known as Cryoto market is a commercial website on the dark web that operates via darkness such as Tor and I2P. These markets primarily indulged in illicit activities such as drug peddling, trade of cyber-arms and weapons, counterfeited currencies, stolen credit card details, forged documents and other illicit goods. Though Darknet started gaining popularity from 2006 onwards, the traces of underground market lie in the early 70s when students at Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology created, dubbed as the first Darknet marketplace, ‘ARPANET’ to purchase cannabis. Since then, many such dark markets have mushroomed such as Cyber-arms Bazaar, ShadowCrew, the Farmer’s Market, Silk Market 2.0, Agora, AlphaBay etc.
I like this article because I have for years looked at options to address the counterfeiting issues which is a extremely costly criminal industry around diamonds and artwork. As we have seen with synthetic diamonds in their use in QC and medical technology there is a lot that technology can do in addressing the counterfeiting issues as well as registration & certification space. Also, could registered & embedded serialized stones be another form of id for the consumer who wears their accessory with the stone? I believe it can be.
IBM launches a new high security blockchain service that uses hardware to protect valuable data, with provenance startup Everledger as its first customer.
About 5 years ago a friend of mine at Microsoft (Mitch S.) had a vision of making a new security model around drone swarms and a form of BMI technology. Glad to see the vision come true.
Scientists have discovered how to control multiple robotic drones using the human brain, an advance that can help develop swarms of search and rescue drones that are controlled just by thought.
A controller wears a skull cap outfitted with 128 electrodes wired to a computer. The device records electrical brain activity. If the controller moves a hand or thinks of something, certain areas light up. “I can see that activity from outside. Our goal is to decode that activity to control variables for the robots,” said Panagiotis Artemiadis, from the Arizona State University in the US. If the user is thinking about spreading the drones out, we know what part of the brain controls that thought, Artemiadis said.
A wireless system sends the thought to the robots. “We have a motion-capture system that knows where the quads are, and we change their distance,” he said. Up to four small robots, some of which fly, can be controlled with brain interfaces. To make them move, the controller watches on a monitor and thinks and pictures the drones performing various tasks.
The warning from QuintessenceLabs’ CTO John Leisoboer is stark. “When sufficiently powerful quantum computers become generally available,” he says, “it’s guaranteed to break all existing cryptographic systems that we know of.”
In other words, he adds, “Everything that we’re doing today will be broken.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Google’s Chrome security software engineer Matt Braithwaite who wrote in a blog post earlier this month that “a hypothetical, future quantum computer would be able to retrospectively decrypt any internet communication that was recorded today”.
Manoj Saxena is the executive chairman of CognitiveScale and a founding managing director of The Entrepreneurs’ Fund IV (TEF), a $100m seed fund focused exclusively on the cognitive computing space.
Saxena is also the chairman of Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, San Antonio branch and Chairman, SparkCognition an Austin based cognitive security and safety analytics company.
Prior to joining TEF, Saxena was general manager, IBM Watson, where his team built the world’s first cognitive systems in healthcare, financial services, and retail. Earlier he founded, built and sold two Austin based software startups.
Good article overall; and yes QC is still evolving. However, to state Quantum networking is in its infancy is a wrong & misleading comment. Since 2009, Quantum Internet has been in beta at Los Alamos Labs. And, researchers will tell you that QC development can as far back as 1970s and the first official QC was introduced in 2009 when the first universal programmable quantum computer was introduced by University of Toronto’s Kim Luke.
Google has launched a two-year Chrome trial aimed at safeguarding the Internet against quantum computers, which security experts predict will shred all data.
As we reported last month app collusion, where apps work together to extract sensitive data, now represents a very real security risk to mobile devices.
To address this emerging threat, component technology firm Formaltech, today is releasing FUSE, a DARPA-funded tool that detects inter-application collusion and other vulnerabilities in Android apps.
The FUSE platform identifies potential security vulnerabilities and tracks information flow through multiple apps, revealing potential collusion between apps. The tool uses static binary analysis to detect vulnerabilities without requiring the source code of the apps, allowing security professionals to analyze third party apps without the need for vendor cooperation. It operates in the cloud, supporting Android app (APK) analysis from anywhere. Developers and testers can easily drill down into the FUSE interface when FUSE displays errors, warnings and informational alarms.
