With the growing development of the digital asset universe, it is common to expect that illicit activities in the dark web will intensify. Over the past years, major cyber-crime and criminal activities have been carried out over the darknet, causing serious damage to financial institutions and individuals around the world.
Now, according to a recent press release, S2W Lab, a South Korean start-up has agreed and signed an official agreement with Interpol over the security of the online networks.
The French-based International Police Organization has entered into an agreement on the start-up of data intelligence to share information on cyber threat intelligence. After the announcement, Suh Sangduk, CEO of S2W Lab said,
“Cybercrime of dark web is hard to track due to its characteristics and wide usage of crypto-currencies and this is where S2W lab specializes in offering a technology which will help the Interpol to mitigate cyber threats prevailing on the dark web landscape”.
Launching back in 2018, S2W Lab is a company with expertise in the extraction and capture of large amounts of key data related to the Dark Net. Tracking data over the Darknet is an extremely tedious task, and police agencies around the world have a number of cybersecurity offices set up to track the offender’s trails.
The above agreement would ease the load on Interpol, as the S2W Lab will reduce the difficulty of filtering the data connected to the targeted individuals that are consistently active on the dark web.
Cyber-Crime in Crypto
Cryptocurrencies are a traceable form of digital assets, and one would assume that criminals would probably stay away from such medium of exchanges. The assumption couldn’t be more wrong.
Earlier in late January, Chainalysis had released a report that revealed that despite Bitcoin’s centralized network, the digital currency continued to register a higher volume of transactions that were linked to the darknet and possible illicit activities.
By the end of 2019, Bitcoin was used to conduct transactions worth over a whopping $601 million.
Jonathan Levin, Chainalysis Co-Founder, said,
“so the darknet markets are definitely evolving in their business models and how they store cryptocurrency that typically if they want to be able to access a large audience of buyers. The vendors, themselves, are still accepting Bitcoin because that’s where the majority of users are still comfortable to spend their cryptocurrency.”
Additionally, the Co-founder also added that crime-related to other digital assets was significantly less, with Bitcoin being the favored digital asset in the Dark Web.
Chainalysis Head of Research, Kimberly Grauer spoke about cryptocurrency money-laundering and believed that over the years, an estimated $2.5 billion in Bitcoin-related illicit activities were transferred to several exchanges.
Major exchanges such as Binance and Huobi were in the mix, with Binance accounting for a share of 27.5 percent.