Kraken blackmarket hijacked a competitor’s darknet platform

January 31, 2023
Kraken Blackmarket Hijacked Darknet Platform Hackers Dark Web

A darknet marketplace called Solaris, which focuses on trading drugs and illegal products, has been hijacked by one of its inferior blackmarket competitors, Kraken. The attacker claimed that it breached Solaris’ network in January last year.

Based on reports, the Solaris Tor site had been observed redirecting users to Kraken’s website. However, there is still no recorded blockchain movement from researchers in the crypto addresses related to the area after the initial hack.

The Solaris black market is a relatively new underground marketplace, as it only emerged after the takedown of Hydra. Experts claimed that the market admins tried to get a portion of the Hydra market.

Hence, this newly emerged market acquired a quarter of the portion and processed about $150,000,000 in illegal sales.

A separate researcher revealed that Solaris’ sudden appearance after Hydra’s downfall earned them 60,000 new registrations. However, Kraken only obtained 10% of new customers.

 

The Kraken blackmarket got envious of the sudden rise of Solaris.

 

The Solaris marketplace is a Russian-speaking platform allegedly connected with a pro-Kremlin hacktivist group called KillNet. This group launched numerous DDoS attacks against Western countries last year.

The researchers also spotted several donations from Solaris to the pre-Russian hacktivist group. One donation reached more than $40k worth of bitcoin. KillNet presumably utilised the assistance to buy more weapons to deploy attacks in future campaigns.

Last December, a Ukrainian analyst claimed it had breached Solaris and stole about $25,000, which was given to a humanitarian charity in Ukraine.

Solaris denied the claims regarding the hack and labelled it a hoax since there is no substantial evidence. Analysts released additional information about the hack and leaked Solaris’ source code and database.

Earlier this week, Kraken blackmarket disclosed that they had controlled Solaris’ GitLab repository, project sources, and infrastructure. The former claimed that they had infiltrated the latter’s system due to several bugs in its code.

Kraken’s admins claimed it took them more than a couple of days to steal the clear text passwords and keys in Solaris’ servers, adding that they had disabled Solaris’ Bitcoin server, which proves the researcher’s observation in the blockchain.

About the author

Leave a Reply