Genesis Market, a cybercrime marketplace, seized by the FBI
“Our seizure of Genesis Market should serve as a warning to cybercriminals who operate or use these criminal marketplaces: The Department of Justice and our international partners will shut down your illegal activities, find you and bring you to justice,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a press release Wednesday .
Officials suspect Genesis was operating from Russia, the Treasury Department said in its own statement, noting that it had a presence on the dark web, a corner of the internet where users can operate anonymously. As of February, Genesis listed about 460,000 packages of stolen information, including passwords to email accounts, video streaming and social media accounts, according to the agency.
The marketplace offered not just passwords, but rather programs that continued to update a user’s personal information as it changed on their devices, constituting a “de facto subscription to the victim’s information,” cybersecurity firm Sophos wrote in an August analysis.
Since its inception in March 2018, Genesis Market has offered access to data stolen from more than 1.5 million computers worldwide, containing over 80 million account access credentials, according to the US Department of Justice.
