Operation Talent: Massive Dark Web Take Down in Joint Legal Action

• An international team of law enforcement agencies seized about five cybercrime websites.
• The dark web market places of Cracked, Nulled, Sellix and Starkdrp were among those that were taken down.
• The take down was conducted as part of 'Operation Talent' by the FBI and law enforcement agencies from 8 countries.

The FBI, and Europol along with other international law enforcement agencies seized several cybercrime websites including Cracked, Nulled, Starkrdp, Sellix, and MySellix. 

Although an official statement from the authorities has not been released yet, based on the banner posted on the dark web portal it could be determined that the action was carried out under a campaign called, ‘Operation Talent’.

The operation involved members from the US, Europol, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Greece, Australia, and Romania. 

The FBI took control of all the information pertaining to the admins, and domains along with the victims stored in the website. They changed the names of the now seized domains to “ns1.fbi.seized.gov and http://dns.cloudflare.com”

The website ‘Nulled’ was used for trading in hacking tools like OpenBullet and SilverBullet and other malicious software. 

StarkRDP was the platform for selling stolen login credentials for further exploitation like phishing and credential stuffing attacks.

Meanwhile, the members of the cybercriminal group are alerting its community about the seized websites and follow up details on Telegram. 

A Cracked operator attributed the access issues to their website to a data center problem and wrote the service may be back in a day.

Another member Cracked wrote, “We are still waiting for the official court documentation from the data centre and the domain host. We will inform you guys further on those details once we have it. A sad day indeed for our community.”

As it appears, cybercriminals affected in the seizure are also waiting to read what the law enforcement agencies will share about the operation. According to a report by Bleeping Computer, legal actions are ongoing and Europol is still investigating all aspects of the take down.