Styx Marketplace, which opened in January, is a new platform on the Dark Web that focuses on financial fraud, designed to provide cybercriminals with the necessary resources — such as credit card information, forged documents, victim reconnaissance, and SIM cards, among others — to carry out their malicious acts.
Though the marketplace only opened this year, analysts noted its launch being discussed back in 2022 on the Dark Web. At the time, Styx Marketplace’s creators were still building the platform and its process of authorizing transactions between buyers and sellers of illegal cybersecurity-related products and services. Now that the marketplace is up and running, once users are registered, they can peruse a variety of services, albeit illicit ones, that can be purchased with Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), or Tether (USDT), according to a blog post by analysts at Rescurity who studied the marketplace.
The threat actors behind Styx Marketplace target geographies across the globe, including the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia, and countries in Asia and the Middle East, proving that combating cybercrime, especially cyber-enabled financial crime, will take a collective, international effort. With the discovery of the marketplace, there is a newfound urgency to put protections in place on behalf of the financial industry in order to safeguard the sensitive information of individuals and organizations alike.
“The banking sector remains vulnerable to threats related to identity authentication,” the Resecurity analysts stated in their blog post. “Cybercriminals are leveraging weaknesses in KYC verification process, while also leveraging new tactics to plant money mules in FIs to facilitate cash-outs and other laundering services.”
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