humanity we’ve ever seen. It’s an aggregated swamp of all the darkest aspects of internet activity – child abuse images, drug markets, gun shops, gore smut, stolen merchandise, anarchist guides, terrorist chats, identity theft, hacking services …
I’m going to focus on the most potent of these tiers – hacking services.
I spent three weeks studying and translating FreeHacks, one of the largest hacking forums on the internet. It’s a Russian community which aims to collectively gather its resources in order to maximize efficiency and knowledge dispersement.
It works the same as any typical forum, you open up TOR (a specialized browser for browsing the dark web), paste in the URL, and land on a home page with various sub-forums split into different categories. The categories are varied and well-divided:
- Hacker world news
- Humor
- Hacking and security
- Carding (stealing credit cards and trying to cash them out on the internet)
- Botnet (a network of bots used to steal data and send spam, or perform
- DDOS attacks)
- Electronics and phreaking (phreaking is trying to break someone’s security network)
- Brutus (software used to crack passwords)
- DDOS (overwhelming a server with requests to shut it down)
- SEO-optimization
- Programming
- Web development
- Malware and exploits
- Private software
- Clothing market (people who use stolen credit cards to buy clothes and resell them)
- Financial operations
- Documentation (passports, driving licenses, citizenships)
- Blacklist (a community judicial system).
