U.S. law enforcement agencies announced the destruction of ssndob, a notorious online black market used to trade millions of Americans' personal information - including social security numbers, that is, the SSN that Americans are most familiar with. The operation was carried out by the Federal Bureau of investigation, the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) with the help of the Cyprus police, and the four domain names hosting the ssndob market --ssndob ws、ssndob. vip、ssndob. Club and blackjob biz。
According to the Department of justice, ssndob listed the personal information of about 24million people in the United States, including their names, dates of birth, SSNs and credit card numbers, and generated more than $19million in income. Blockchain analyst chainalysis also reported that since april2015, the market has received nearly $22million worth of bitcoin in more than 100000 transactions, although it is believed that the market has been active since at least 2013.
According to chainalysis, these figures show that some users are purchasing a large amount of personal identity information from the service. They also found the connection between ssndob and joker's stash, a large dark network market focusing on stolen credit card information, which was closed in January 2021.
According to the Ministry of justice, ssdob operators are said to have adopted various technologies to protect their anonymity and obstruct the detection of their activities, including using online names different from their real identities, and strategically switching and maintaining servers in different countries.
"Identity theft can have devastating effects on the long-term emotional and financial health of victims." "Closing the ssndob website disrupted identity theft criminals and helped millions of Americans whose personal information had been leaked," said Darrell Waldon, an agent in charge of the Criminal Investigation Office of the Internal Revenue Service in Washington, D.C
The seizure of ssndob's infrastructure marked that US law enforcement agencies continued to strengthen their efforts to disrupt malicious network activities. Last week, Europol announced the closure of flubot, an Android Trojan horse that steals online banking information. The US Department of justice recently disclosed that it had seized the domain names used by three cyber criminals to trade stolen personal information and promote distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.