US says computer hacking forum Darkode dismantled, 12 charged

Darkode, a password-protected online forum for criminal hackers, represented one of the gravest threats to the integrity of data on computers across the world, according to David Hickton, US attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania.

Hacking groups such as the now infamous Lizard Squad were known to frequent the forum before it was shut down by a coordinated worldwide operation, which involved law enforcement agencies from 18 countries, writes Samuel Gibbs for The Guardian. The secretive, members-only site was the largest-known English language malware forum in the world until the Federal Bureau of Investigation got a court order to shut it down, investigators said.

Darkode.com, an alleged criminal hacking forum, has been shut down by law enforcement agencies from 20 countries, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Wednesday, July 15, 2015. The prospective member then pitched the skill or products he or she could bring to the forum.

The NCA said that 28 arrests were made in various countries as part of the operation to take down the site where hacking goods and services were traded.

Steven Laval, senior investigating officer at the National Cyber Crime Unit, said: “This has been a truly global operation, targeting both the infrastructure of an online hub for high-end cyber crime, and suspected members of its criminal community”. The nations comprising the coalition include Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Israel, Latvia, Macedonia, Nigeria, Romania, Serbia, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. He called it “a stark reminder that private forums are no sanctuary for criminals”.

“The FBI has effectively smashed the hornets’ nest and we are in the process of rounding up and charging the hornets”, Hickton said.

Among the 12 people charged was Johan Anders Gudmunds, of Sweden, who the Justice Department said was the site’s administrator.

A Pittsburgh man identified as Morgan C. Culbertson, 20, was charged with conspiring to send malicious code. He is accused of creating the Darkode forum, and selling malware on Darkode designed to surreptitiously intercept and collect email addresses and passwords from network communications.

Twelve people have been charged in the United States by federal prosecutors in Pittsburgh, Wisconsin, Louisiana and the District of Columbia, including Daniel Placek, 27, of Glendale, Wisconsin, and Matjaz Skorjanc, of Maribor, Slovenia.

John Lynch, Chief of the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section called Darkode “a self-contained market” with sophisticated relationships in which participants used their connections to maximize the amount of money and damage they could extract.

A Binghamton, New York, man infected computers with something called Facebook Spreader, used to send out spam messages on the social media site, authorities said. He is accused of designing Dendroid, a coded malware meant to remotely access, control, and steal data from Google Android cellphones.