Kraken seizes illegal Solaris darknet market

Solaris was a major darknet market that specialized in illegal drugs. It has now been bought by Kraken, a competitor smaller than him. Kraken claims to have hack it on January 13 2022.

While the Tor website of Solaris redirects to Kraken at the moment, blockchain monitoring specialists report that there have been no changes in cryptocurrency addresses as associated with this site since January 13th 2022.

After the , the Solaris market was created a few months back to try and capture some of the once-disturbed market. This new market captured 25% of the market in a matter of days and made approximately $150,000,000 worth illegal sales.

A about the development of new drug markets stated that Solaris had received approximately 60,000 registrations since Hydra died suddenly. Kraken only took 10%.

Competitors down

Solaris, which was Russian-language platform, is reportedly associated with Killnet. Killnet is a pro-Kremlin hacktivist organization that launched numerous DDoS attacks on western organizations in 2022.

Elliptic has located several Bitcoin donations that were made from Solaris to Killnet. This amounts to over $44,000. This money was likely used by the DDoS group to buy more firepower and launch disruptive attacks.

Alex Holden , a Ukrainian cyber-intelligence analyst, claimed that he had breached Solaris in December 2022 and stole $25,000 which was then donated to charity in Ukraine.

Solaris denied the hack claims and pointed out the absence of evidence. Holden . He also leaked the source code and database allegedly linked to the market.

Kraken, a group of hackers, announced that they have taken control of Solaris’ infrastructure and GitLab repository.

Kraken claims it took them three full days to steal clear text passwords, keys, and infrastructure from Solaris servers. They then downloaded everything, without any interference.

The attackers claimed that they had disabled Solaris’ Bitcoin server. This is in line with Elliptic’s observation on the blockchain.

The code has many bugs that you could still turn around and continue to be relevant. A clear-text storage of passwords or keys from servers is a bigger error, as the whole school has done it,” Elliptic claims in a Kraken Marketplace note.

We downloaded everything that was supposed to be in these cases. It took us three days, and no one tried to stop us. PS: We intentionally disabled bitcoin servers to ensure that nobody steals any data, though this was probably not in vain.

We warned that everything written is an answer to the aggression directed at us in the amount x10. This applies to all.

At the moment, Killnet and no one from Solaris’ core team have made any announcements about the status of the platform or the validity Kraken’s claims.

Kraken also supports the Kremlin so it is unlikely that Kraken’s motives are political.

They appear to be motivated by market interest. Taking over a competitor is one way they can achieve growth. However, it also raises concerns about security in the market.