The U.S. Justice Department announced recently that the dark web Alpha Bay had been shut down. The effort was a joint investigation by Enterpol, Dutch authorities, the FBI and others.

Customers who had used Alpha Bay for their illicit goods soon flocked to the dark web site Hansa Market. Unbeknown to the criminals, the site had been seized and continued to be run by police in The Netherlands.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions referred to the take down as “the largest takedown in world history.” Alpha Bay had some 40,000 vendors and more than 200,000 customers.

Rob Wainwright, director of Europol, remarked how swiftly customers stampeded to Hansa.

Wainwright told the media: “What this meant…was that we could identify and disrupt the regular criminal activity that was happening on Hansa Market but also sweep up all of those new users that were displaced from AlphaBay and looking for a new trading plot form for their criminal activities.”

“In fact, they flocked to Hansa in droves,” Wainwright continued. “We recorded an eight times increase in the number of human users on Hansa immediately following the takedown of AlphaBay. Since the undercover operation to take over Hansa market by the Dutch Police, usernames and passwords of thousands of buyers and sellers of illicit commodities have been identified and are the subject of follow-up investigations by Europol and our partner agencies.”

Ronnie Tokazowski, a senior analyst at Flashpoint, said: “One of the things [the Dutch Police and FBI] mentioned was they were going after other markets using some of the several thousand password credentials they had from AlphaBay and Hansa, as a way to get access to vendor accounts,” on other marketplaces, he said. “These actions are really going to have a lot of people asking who they can trust.”

Source: Krebs On Security