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Crime

Site Aims To Be the "Google" of the Underweb 78

Posted by samzenpus from the best-of-the-bad dept.
tsu doh nimh writes "A new service in the cyber underground aims to be the Google search of underground Web sites, connecting buyers to a vast sea of shops that offer an array of dodgy goods and services, from stolen credit card numbers to identity information and anonymity tools. From the story: 'A glut of data breaches and stolen card numbers has spawned dozens of stores that sell the information. The trouble is that each shop requires users to create accounts and sign in before they can search for cards. Enter MegaSearch, which lets potential buyers discover which fraud shops hold the cards they're looking for without having to first create accounts at each store.'"
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Site Aims To Be the "Google" of the Underweb More

Site Aims To Be the "Google" of the Underweb

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  • "Underweb" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bonch ( 38532 ) * on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @10:35PM (#38744496)

    "Cyber underground," ooh, scary. Clearly, the author of this article has never visited any onion indexing sites. Seriously though, f this is a publicly accessible web server, and the creator is working directly with fraud shops, it seems like it's only a matter of time before authorities find a way to catch him. Even just by arresting one of the shop owners who might flip.

    • unless they are operating under the cover of TOR....

      • Re:"Underweb" (Score:5, Informative)

        by bonch ( 38532 ) * on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @11:15PM (#38744748)

        Well, the site is publicly accessible at http://megasearch.cc./ [megasearch.cc.] The guy even has his Jabber contact up. It's actually kind of suspicious and makes me wonder if it's all a joke or honeypot.

        • Re:"Underweb" (Score:5, Informative)

          by Zamphatta ( 1760346 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @11:31PM (#38744842) Homepage
          I thought the whole thing screams "honeypot". I doubt any of the experiences bad guys will fall for this... which means they'll catch a lot of newbies and people who otherwise wouldn't have tried this line of "work". I wonder if they could get in trouble for entrapment? Hmm. Interesting. Although, I could be totally wrong, I'd still definitely avoid the place like the plague if I was looking to buy or sell there.

          • Re:"Underweb" (Score:5, Insightful)

            by mhajicek ( 1582795 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @11:54PM (#38745012)
            There's no such thing as "entrapment" any more.
            • People don't understand what entrapment is. It's not an undercover cop going "Hey look, there's a nice gold watch over here that someone left, maybe you should take it." and then arresting you when you do. It's not illegal to provide an opportunity and then catch the criminal in the act. It IS illegal to say "Hey, go steal that guy's gold watch or I'll kill your whole family."

              See the difference? Read up on it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrapment [wikipedia.org]

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by nurb432 ( 527695 )

              Especially when you had to go looking for the 'bad guy' in the first place.. its not like they drove up to your house and asked 'hey buddy, want to buy a virus?'

          • Re:"Underweb" (Score:4, Interesting)

            by mug funky ( 910186 ) on Thursday January 19, 2012 @01:20AM (#38745470)

            and the headlines would be full of "cyber gang busted" stories regardless.

            if you can only catch small fish, you'll shout to the heavens just how many you got.

          • If this is a honeypot, lets create some tinyurl links and post them on e.g. Foxnews website or something to give them some bees :-)
            (Disclaimer: This was a joke, not a real encouragement to do any dodgy stuff. If you can't tell the difference better stay out of the internet.)

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by jez9999 ( 618189 )

              Fox news website? I thought you wanted to give them websites that WEREN'T connected to dodgy illegal activities.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by oztiks ( 921504 )

          slashdotted

    • Sometimes I suspect that /. editors consciously flaming.

  • I saw the fed! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by owenferguson ( 521762 ) <owenferguson@hot ... minus herbivore> on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @10:38PM (#38744520)
    Honeypot much? Nice try, guys. Way to debut it at the end of the humpday protest cycle.

  • Ruining it for the rest of us. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nitehawk214 ( 222219 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @10:49PM (#38744590)

    Sites like this are why the general public thinks that laws like SOPA are ok.

    Or let me put it another way, if you are creating a search engine for it... it isn't underground.

    • Re:Ruining it for the rest of us. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @10:56PM (#38744624)

      Awful convenient timing for something like this to be a big story eh?

      I felt "left out" after reading about the glorious underground for about 5 seconds. Then I thought.... Who seeks that kind of shit out? nevermind

    • mywot.com and malwarebytes blocked it! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @11:12PM (#38744736)

      Out of curiously, I tried to visit MegaSearch.cc.
      1. My 1st block of the site: http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/megasearch.cc
      2. My 2nd block of the site: My Malwarebytes stopped the site from loading.
      I have no desire to visit this site but thought you guys may want to use my apps to help you keep out of trouble.
      Just a thought...

    • It doesn't look like these guys plan to give up. Eventually the furor will die down and these bastards will get their way. We can't shut down the Internet to protest every day. The idea is to have a tech solution ready before then. IPV6 should help. We have about 3 months to engineer a resilient, fault-tolerant congress-proof Othernet. Hopefully the Right People are all over this, and a solution will come in time to save us from the CNN'ification of the interwebs. I'm really not looking forward to ge

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      You know, that's actually an interesting point about SOPA.

      What this guy is doing is illegal under the RICO act, The problem is mechanism: how exactly would you use RICO to shut him down?

      Well, you'd start with an investigation. Unless the guy is a money laundering genius, you should be able to trace back from the infrastructure he uses (DNS, Internet access, server hosting) back to some kind of bank transaction that will reveal his identity.

      So what happens when you run into a block like a DNS service that ke

      • SOPA wont hurt organizations like this. If they cant fight him with standard laws, and they use SOPA to blast his site off the internet, it is trivial for him to emerge on a new domain at a new hosting site.

        In the meantime all the other customers of the hosting site will be removed from the internet. Collateral damage abound hurts everyone except and the intended target escapes with only a minor inconvenience.

        Granted I don't think Megasearch has any legal purposes, and they are qualifying themselves for an

  • Hipster hackers used undergound websites (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ... before they were searchable.

  • IT'S A CONSPIRACY (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19, 2012 @12:12AM (#38745130)

    Funny that this should surface NOW, right before SOPA is voted on.....I smell a conspiracy....Seriously we need another word for conspiracy, mere mention of the word and people think your stark raving mad.

  • Hmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by MeatoBurrito ( 1990634 ) on Thursday January 19, 2012 @12:15AM (#38745142)
    Makes me miss astalavista
    • Man that place was amazing, such a great search engine. I stayed with altavista and astalavista all the way through college, at least up till Google came around and ruined it all....or was that made it better?

      • or was that made it better?

        That thing WAS good. Way back in the 90s, you could actually ask an english natural-language question at Altavista, and have a serious chance at getting a response that made sense. Now try THAT at Slashdot in 2012 !

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Fuck natural language searches (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          As someone who has been using the internet since before thw www existed (and used Google as early as its second prototype in 1998 and ever since), as well as many other search engines before Google was created (Lycos, Hotbot, Altavista and many, many others) I can say definitively that Google is the success that is today BECAUSE Altavista (note: the op said astalavista, which I think was a search engine aggregator) sucked so badly. In the late 90's, you could only count on an index update on Altavista every

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Parent said *ASTAlavista* - it was a "hacking" search engine

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

          I ask natural language questions at slashdot all the time, and almost always get good answers... from real humans. Which was how AltaVista worked. They didn't use web crawlers, they had humans picking sites. I had a hell of a time getting my site listed with them, although I finally did.

          Infoseek was far better, but still not a Google.

    • i shall return

    • Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)

      by dotancohen ( 1015143 ) on Thursday January 19, 2012 @04:57AM (#38746166) Homepage

      Makes me miss astalavista

      Still there!
      http://astalavista.box.sk/ [astalavista.box.sk]

  • See who's searching for YOUR credit card number (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19, 2012 @02:00AM (#38745604)

    More importantly, now there's one place where you can enter your credit card number and see who all has been stealing it.

  • Here's what I'm getting from this article... (Score:5, Funny)

    by brennanw ( 5761 ) on Thursday January 19, 2012 @02:44AM (#38745728) Homepage Journal

    ... indentity theives have to create private accounts in cyber crime stores. o_O

    When they're buying their batch of stolen credit card numbers, probably with another stolen credit card number, does the store then steal the stolen credit card number and start using it themselves? Which they might then add to the next batch of stolen credit card numbers... which the identity thief might then buy back the next time he buys a new batch of stolen credit card numbers...

    ... it's the cycle of crime!

  • Now there's a companion to the 'Facebook of pr0n' I keep reading about on the...library.

  • Just like Google? (Score:4, Funny)

    by CheerfulMacFanboy ( 1900788 ) on Thursday January 19, 2012 @04:47AM (#38746140) Journal
    So they will collect all kind of info about you and sell it to their real customers.

  • Now let me pay for it with this credit card number. It's real, really. I wouldn't rip you off, sir!

  • Is this another Kimble scam? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Kim Schmitz, aka "Kimble," the snake-oil "hacker" has a thing for the word "mega." He had a custom-built "Megacar," is rumoured to be the one behind "Megaupload.com." And now we have another one, "megasearch."

    Attrition.org has a nice dossier on this phoney baloney hacker. Why people keep falling for his scams is beyond me.

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