A 34-year-old U.Ok. nationwide has been arraigned within the U.S. for working a darkish internet market referred to as The Real Deal that specialised within the gross sales of hacking instruments and stolen login credentials.
Daniel Kaye, who glided by a litany of pseudonyms Popopret, Bestbuy, UserL0ser, and Spdrman, has been charged with 5 counts of entry system fraud and one depend of cash laundering conspiracy.
Kaye was indicted in April 2021, and subsequently consented to his extradition from Cyprus to the U.S. in September 2022.
“While residing abroad, this defendant allegedly operated an unlawful web site that made hacking instruments and login credentials out there for buy, together with these for U.S. authorities businesses,” stated U.S. Attorney Ryan Ok. Buchanan.
Court paperwork present that The Real Deal, till its shutdown in 2016, functioned as a marketplace for illicit gadgets, together with stolen account logins for U.S. authorities computer systems, financial institution accounts, and social media platforms reminiscent of Twitter and LinkedIn.
Also peddled by means of the portal had been plundered bank card info, private information, botnets, hacking instruments, unlawful medicine, and weapons which had been listed on the market by distributors, who had their very own profile pages that provided an choice to rank them.
Some of the U.S. authorities computer systems whose credentials had been allegedly offered by Kaye belong to the U.S. Postal Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the U.S. Navy.
Kaye was beforehand arrested by the U.Ok. regulation enforcement authorities in February 2017, and was subsequently jailed for 32 months in January 2019 for attacking an African cellphone firm that knocked Liberia offline in 2016.
“[Kaye] ran a botnet utilizing a modified Mirai variant which unfold by way of zero-day exploits,” safety researcher Marcus Hutchins famous in a sequence of Tweets. “Some of the DDoS assaults we noticed had been peaking at over 1 Tbps.”
Furthermore, the indictment accuses Kaye of conniving with a number of individuals going by the title “thedarkoverlord” to promote Social Security numbers, to not point out launder the cryptocurrency proceeds of the sale by means of mixing providers like Bitmixer.io to obscure the cash trails.
“This case is an instance of our persistent willpower to work with our worldwide companions to carry criminals accountable irrespective of how subtle their cyber fraud or their geographic location,” stated Keri Farley, Special Agent in Charge of FBI Atlanta.