Darkweb Alphabay Resurgence

March 21, 2018
Anti Phishing Service Alphabay

Empire Market a Shadow of the Glorious Alphabay

It is back and now with a different name. The former site which was well-known in the Dark Web used to be called Alphabay was seized and then shut down by the authorities. A lot of dark netizens were hopeful that the site would re-emerge with a clone mirrored on a different server which did happen but did not last too long as authorities were able to trace them. Some were also hoping that Alphabay will come back with a different name, and here it comes to no surprise it came back as Empire Market.

This new market who claimed to be the former Alphabay market looks like the spitting image of it. The system for vendors and buyers are identical. What differs are the mode of payment used and accepted on trading for goods. Originally Alphabay accepts Bitcoin, Ethereum and Monero, then next thing we knew the whole site got shutdown.

Now Empire Market accepts Bitcoin and Litecoin for their transactions, however there are plans to adopt altcoins such as Bitcoin cash, Monero, Ethereum, and Zcash. It was expected because the site it used to be already accepted those cryptocurrencies. Possibly they are still reviewing how these coins affect their anonymity. But security concerns does not end on the use of cryptocurrencies as we all know.

Security Concerns

One of the most important topic is how safe your data is in the darkweb, as a precaution never use real life data no matter how encrypted your method is when browsing the darknet sites. Why? It is because it proved that sites like Alphabay and Hansa can get infiltrated, seized and shutdown. How did that happen? Believe it or not methods used for penetrating e-commerce sites was able to compromise the security and found out that Empire Market has a lot of security holes that it looked like the creator of the marketplace never considered much about the safety of the site and its members on the back end. There were bug-hunters who voluntarily tests Darknet sites to look for vulnerabilities and inform the administrators of such sites, one famous penetration tester is HugBunter and some other hunters such as penthat of Reddit who discovered security flaws that enabled them to even hack into the database of the registered users. If the vulnerabilities of the site will not be remedied, then this site could easily be taken over by anyone that authorities will likely take them down again in the future.

About the author

Leave a Reply