AlphaBay, formerly the internet’s largest “darknet site,” had already gone offline July 5 with the arrest in Thailand of its alleged creator and administrator. Like AlphaBay, Hansa operated in the darknet, an anonymity-friendly internet netherworld inaccessible to standard browsers. But this time, Dutch police have upped the ante by craftily tracking darknet users, and that’s expected to yield future arrests. They began running the Hansa site on June 20, impersonating its administrators, collecting usernames and passwords, logging data on thousands of drug sales and informing local police in nations where shipments would be arriving. Dutch cybercrime prosecutor Martijn Egberts said Dutch police had scooped up some 10,000 addresses for Hansa buyers outside Holland.

Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer July 20, 2017 23:48 UTC