My terrifying deep dive into one of Russia's largest hacking forums

[turbinetree]

Dylan Curran

I spent three weeks studying FreeHacks, one of the dark web’s biggest platform for hackers. From passports to credit cards, nothing is safe

The darknet (or dark web) is one of the most fascinating vestiges of humanity we’ve ever seen. It’s an aggregated swamp of all the darkest aspects of Internet activity - child porn, 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:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/24/darknet-dark-web-hacking-forum-internet-safety

-snip-

A lot of the information on this forum is incredibly worrying, even if a lot of it is harmless 15-year-olds trying to be edgy and hack their friend’s phones. In any case, it’s important to know these communities exist. The dark underbelly of the internet isn’t going anywhere.

[Squinch]

1. That whole article is terrifying!

[turbinetree]

2. And in this country we have do nothing Congress, doing exactly what............

and this article is another wake-up call that something has to be done................