Italian police have shut down a Dark Web marketplace offering illegal goods ranging from child pornography to forged luncheon vouchers, and seized 11,000 bitcoin wallets worth about 1 million euros, authorities said Friday.Officials compared the marketplace discovered by “Operation Babylon” to the Silk Road online black market that was taken down by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2013.More than 14,000 people had signed up to the illegal community, which was allegedly run by an Italian living near Naples. There was evidence of 170,000 transaction messages on the Tor platform, which provided 12 kinds of hidden services, police said. These ranged from pornographic images to arms, drugs, false identity papers, hacker kits and credit card codes.The site hosted around 210 drug dealers, including a notorious operator who uses the pseudonym “Pablo Escobar” after the late Colombian drug lord. “The virtual world of the Dark Web has its own hierarchies and severe rules on access and affiliation. Getting into such a closed community was extremely difficult,” Michele Prestipino, a public prosecutor who coordinated the investigation, told a press conference in Rome.Dark Web sites do not show up on normal search engines, and the Italian site provided detailed instructions to help users screen their identities. Police officers working undercover succeeded in penetrating the illegal community in a two-year operation that began as an investigation into the online exchange of child pornography.Italian investigators have been cooperating with Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, and the FBI, to identify customers and sellers who connected on the Italian-operated platform.Prestipino said the inquiry had been a new experience for Italian law enforcement, revealing the existence of an “incredible criminal world, parallel to Internet, which paradoxically represents only a small part of the communications taking place over the Web,” he said. “For us this investigation is just a point of departure.” Related content news Arm patches bugs in Mali GPUs that affect Android phones and Chromebooks The vulnerability with active exploitations allows local non-privileged users to access freed-up memory for staging new attacks. By Shweta Sharma Oct 03, 2023 3 mins Android Security Android Security Mobile Security news UK businesses face tightening cybersecurity budgets as incidents spike More than a quarter of UK organisations think their cybersecurity budget is inadequate to protect them from growing threats. By Michael Hill Oct 03, 2023 3 mins CSO and CISO Risk Management news Cybersecurity experts raise concerns over EU Cyber Resilience Act’s vulnerability disclosure requirements Open letter claims current provisions will create new threats that undermine the security of digital products and individuals. By Michael Hill Oct 03, 2023 4 mins Regulation Compliance Vulnerabilities feature The value of threat intelligence — and challenges CISOs face in using it effectively Knowing the who, what, when, and how of bad actors and their methods is a boon to security, but experts say many teams are not always using such intel to their best advantage. By Mary K. Pratt Oct 03, 2023 10 mins CSO and CISO Advanced Persistent Threats Threat and Vulnerability Management Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe