The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) Thursday said it disrupted
and took down the infrastructure of an underground marketplace
known as “Slilpp” that specialized in trading stolen login
credentials as part of an international law enforcement
operation.
Over a dozen individuals have been charged or arrested in
connection with the illegal marketplace. The cyber crackdown, which
involved the joint efforts of the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands,
and Romania, also commandeered a set of servers hosting its
infrastructure as well as the multiple domains the group
operated.
Operational since 2012, Slilpp was an marketplace for allegedly
stolen online account login credentials belonging to 1,400
companies worldwide, offering for sale more than 80 million
plundered usernames and passwords for bank accounts, online payment
accounts, mobile phone accounts, retailer accounts, and other
online accounts, which were abused to conduct unauthorized
transactions, such as wire transfers, from the related
accounts.
Based on existing victim reports, the DoJ said the pilfered
login credentials sold over Slilpp have been used to siphon no less
than $200 million in the U.S.
“The Slilpp marketplace allegedly caused hundreds of millions of
dollars in losses to victims worldwide, including by enabling
buyers to steal the identities of American victims,” said[1]
Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicholas L. McQuaid of the DoJ’s
Criminal Division. “The department will not tolerate an underground
economy for stolen identities, and we will continue to collaborate
with our law enforcement partners worldwide to disrupt criminal
marketplaces wherever they are located.”
The development comes amid a flurry of law enforcement actions
against cybercrime groups in recent months, including that of
TrickBot[2], Emotet[3], and ANoM[4]. Slilpp is also the
third marketplace to be taken down by the DoJ after xDedic[5]
(January 2019) and DEER.IO[6]
(January 2021), both of which catered to harvesting and selling
login credentials.