Authorities shut down Alphabay, wondering which will be the marketplace that will reach the top and which will be the impact on the criminal ecosystem?
AlphaBay was shut down by law enforcement and the alleged mastermind committed suicide in jail while waiting for the extradition to the US.
The event will have a significant impact on the cyber criminal underground, now it is interesting to analyze the evolution of the others black marketplaces in order to understand which will be the biggest one in the next months.
A good source could be the Dark Net Markets Comparison Chart published by the website DeepDotWeb.com, it integrates marketplace data with the hidden Dark Net Markets List ratings, along with uptime status data provided by our monitoring system and creation dates from Gwern.net.
The researchers at DeepDotWeb used the following parameter to evaluate the popularity of each market, data is relayed to the past 28 days until July 12.
Impressions & Clicks – These two features give us an indication of the number of pages from this site will appear on Google for search queries containing the market name.
Searches on the site – is simple how many times people entered the site search terms that relate to the specific market in DeepDotWeb’s internal search.
Hits on related pages: How many visits there were on pages inside deepdotweb that their focus is some specific market (filtered using google analytics).
The table proposed by the DeepDotWeb shows that the Russian black marketplace RAMP (Russian Anonymous Marketplace) and DreamMarker are the biggest markets after the shutdown of the AlphaBay, followed by the Hansa Market.
RAMP marketplace (http://ramp5bb7v2abm34a.onion) is a Russian marketplace having a forum-like organization, it is frequented by prominent hackers from Eastern Europe.
Due to the forum-like structure, the products are not organized into categories, it is not easy to calculate the exact number of listings or vendors on RAMP.
RAMP is operating since September 2012, it is probably the oldest running darknet market! It has already outlived its rivals Silk Road, Agora, and AlphaBay.
It is not clear how RAMP survived so long, there are some speculations regarding its longevity, someone believes that the main reason is that it is a Russian focused market.
There are four main categories of vendors on RAMP:
- Audited Dealers
- Private Points
- Market
- Miscellaneous
The Audited Dealers group includes the more reliable group of vendors.
Like black marketplace, RAMP lists several prohibited posts and discussions about illegal goods and activities, including drugs, pornography and child pornography, weapons, fake documents. and banknotes.
“Based on the statistics presented on the forum at the time we did this review, RAMP had 186,304 users; 13,224 created topics, 931,494 posts (all time), and 88 posts for the week. These numbers show that RAMP is indeed a significant darknet community.” states the analysis published on the website Darknetmarkets.co.”The longevity and popularity of Russian Anonymous Marketplace appear surprising to some especially as the site claims to make around a quarter of a million every year but RAMPs’ owners believe that this is because it is in Russian and serves predominantly Russian users. Also, it could be due to its focus on drugs and prohibition of hacking and pornography.”
The Dream Market (http://lchudifyeqm4ldjj.onion/?ai=1675) has been around since Nov/Dec 2013, it is an excellent aggregator for buyers and sellers of any kind of drugs (i.e. Cannabis, Benzos, Ecstasy, etc.).
The filtering feature makes it easy to search the items offered on the black market places.
The listing for Digital Goods is growing with sellers offering mostly fraud-related goods, such as stolen account data, stolen credit card data (CV, CCV) and fake documents.
Many sellers offer guides and tutorials on hacking and other illegal activities such as carding, it is also possible to find counterfeit banknotes from many countries. Hacking services are skinny, no significant deals are available. Same story for purchasing and customizing malware, it is quite easy to find well-known RATs and Keylogger, but this isn’t the right place where to find complex malware.
http://lchudifyeqm4ldjj.onion/?ai=1675
The remain markets are smaller and the values of parameters used for the analysis demonstrate it.
| Name | Impressions | Clicks | Searchs on site | Hits on related pages |
| Alphabay (Defunct) | 323,452 | 67,713 | 1,116 | 408,016 |
| RAMP (Russian) | 58,618 | 23,413 | 363 | 210,271 |
| Dream Market | 56,430 | 32,467 | 451 | 227,470 |
| Hansa Market | 55,629 | 16,811 | 1 | 98,090 |
| Silk road 3.1 | 10,418 | 1,048 | 10 | 14,365 |
| House of lions | 74 | 25 | 1 | 9,023 |
| Darknet Heroes League | 578 | 275 | 11 | 7,499 |
| Apple market | 177 | 14 | 2,680 | 6,727 |
| WALL ST Market | 885 | 68 | 4 | 5,593 |
| The Majestic garden | 2,353 | 849 | 1 | 4,655 |
| CGMC | 811 | 244 | 5 | 3,576 |
| Zion Market | 327 | 14 | 3 | 3,325 |
| TradeRoute | 260 | 103 | 7 | 3,061 |
| Pyramid market | 9 | 0 | 0 | 2,699 |
| Pekarmarket | 8 | 4 | 1 | 1,932 |
| RSclub | 69 | 32 | 0 | 1,538 |
| Tochka | 50 | 11 | 104 | 396 |
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Pierluigi Paganini
(Security Affairs – DarkWeb, AlphaBay)
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