Walter Finch
SPANISH police were part of a 17-country-strong international police operation to bring down one of the world’s largest illegal marketplaces for stolen account credentials.
Known as Genesis Market, it was considered one of the biggest networks in the world enabling criminals to steal people’s identities and carry out fraud against them.
Hundreds of searches carried out worldwide on Tuesday, April 4 led to 119 arrests.
There are thought to be at least 700,000 digital identities in Spain alone compromised by hackers from Genesis Market.
Its main criminal commodity was digital identities. Set up in 2017, it boasted a user-friendly, English language interface that required little technical expertise.
Login information on sale included account details and passwords to Facebook, PayPal, Netflix, Amazon, eBay, Uber and Airbnb.
The marketplace would offer for sale what it referred to as ‘bots’ that infected victims’ devices through malware or account takeovers attacks.
Through these bots, criminals would get access to all a target’s data such as fingerprints, cookies, saved logins and autofill form data.
This information was collected in real time – the buyers would be notified of any change of passwords or other security measures.
For less than a euro ranging up to several hundreds of euros, thieves could even get financial information which would allow access to online banking accounts.
“With over 1.5 million bots listed on Genesis Market, chances are that your credentials have already ended up for sale on this criminal marketplace,” organising agency Europol said in a statement.
Dutch police have set up this website which allows you to check if your email address is among the millions that have already been targeted.
“On this site, you can check whether your data was for sale on Genesis Market,” it reads.
“If your email address was on the list on the website, within minutes the police will notify you at that email address.
“Check both your inbox and your spambox for an email from the police. If you do not receive an email from the police, your email address was not on Genesis Market.”
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