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 feature 3 ways to fix old, unsafe code that lingers from open-source and legacy programs Code vulnerability is not only a risk of open-source code, with many legacy systems still in use — whether out of necessity or lack of visibility — the truth is that cybersecurity teams will inevitably need to address the problem. By Maria Korolov Nov 29, 2023 9 mins Security Practices Vulnerabilities Security news Amazon’s AWS Control Tower aims to help secure your data’s borders As digital compliance tasks and data sovereignty rules get ever more complicated, Amazon wants automation to help. By Jon Gold Nov 28, 2023 3 mins Regulation Cloud Security news North Korean hackers mix code from proven malware campaigns to avoid detection Threat actors are combining RustBucket loader with KandyKorn payload to effect an evasive and persistent RAT attack. By Shweta Sharma Nov 28, 2023 3 mins Malware feature How a digital design firm navigated its SOC 2 audit L+R's pursuit of SOC 2 certification was complicated by hardware inadequacies and its early adoption of AI, but a successful audit has provided security and business benefits. By Alex Levin Nov 28, 2023 11 mins Certifications Compliance 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