![]() Law enforcement would benefit from a strategic/tactical assessment of the scope of the criminal abuse of alternative Darknets (such as I2P and Freenet).Ģ015 has been a tumultuous year for Darknet markets, with the underground economy plagued by major exit scams and market closures.Part of this effort must focus on locating hidden services, to give ownership of an investigation to a specific Member State. A harmonised approach to undercover investigations with clear directions and boundaries is required across the EU. The difficulties faced by law enforcement operating lawfully in these environments are clear with many jurisdictions restricted by their national legislation.It is essential therefore that appropriate training and tool support is extended to those working in these areas to provide them with the required knowledge and expertise. ![]() It is not feasible or practical that all such crime is dealt with by cybercrime units when the predicate crime is related to drugs, firearms or some other illicit commodity. ![]() Darknets are an environment where cyber-facilitated crime is becoming firmly established.This will serve to prevent duplication of effort, facilitate the sharing of tactics and tools and improve our understanding of the scope of the threat. Given the significant challenges investigations on the Darknet present to law enforcement, this represents an area where effective deconfliction, collaboration and the sharing of intelligence sharing is essential.What the repercussions of the migration of existing Darknet drug and illicit commodities markets to this type of system would be for law enforcement investigations is not yet clear, however the first drugs listings appeared only hours after OpenBazaar’s official launch 159. The system is entirely peer-to-peer with no centralised servers and uses multisignature (multisig) bitcoin addresses for security 158. Customers can search for goods and purchase directly from a merchant using bitcoins. OpenBazaar is a decentralised marketplace accessed through a client. New projects such as OpenBazaar may overcome this weakness though. While their locations may be hidden, they are still hosted somewhere which often represents a single point of potential failure – not taking into account criminal business continuity plans. Hidden services may remain protected behind different anonymisation solutions but Operation Onymous highlighted that these networks are not impervious. While initiatives such as this no doubt represent a fascinating area of academic study, one must question who the principal benefactors of this new technology will likely be, with so many obvious advantages to those operating against the good of society such as violent extremists and child sex offenders. ![]() The project was created with anonymous file sharing in mind 156, and to prevent snooping by “authoritarian” governments 157. Riffle incorporates Tor’s onion encryption and ‘shuffles’ traffic to minimise the possibilities of traffic analysis. We can however still expect to see the improvement of existing and the development of new networks as researchers and developers seek to overcome the flaws and limitations of existing networks whilst building on their strengths networks such as Riffle which is under development by MIT 155. There is still a clear preference for Tor, perhaps due to the simplicity of its use, or conversely the technical challenges of moving to I2P. We previously reported the possibility of a wholesale movement from Tor to other networks such as I2P, however this has not happened. Of course, other developers are also looking for ways to plug the security holes to make the system safer for legitimate users. Criminals shelter themselves behind imperfect anonymisation solutions while law enforcement and researchers seek to find ways to penetrate their shields of anonymity, while keeping protection intact for legitimate users. Conversely, the opposite is largely true with regards to the use of Darknets and hidden services. In other areas of cybercrime, there is a continuous arms race between cybercriminals looking for vulnerabilities to exploit and security professionals looking to defend against them.
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