The Underground Economy and Dark Web Markets
The market that sustains organized cybercrime
Behind almost every financially motivated cyberattack there's a supply chain that operates with the logic of any market: initial access brokers who sell stolen credentials or access to already compromised networks, developers who offer malware as a service with technical support included, and specialized forums where stolen data is traded by volume and quality. These markets operate mainly on the dark web, accessible through networks such as Tor that anonymize the origin of connections, and use cryptocurrencies to process payments, making traditional financial tracing harder. Understanding this economy is key to the investigation because it reveals that many attacks aren't the work of a single actor with every capability, but of a chain of specialists who never interact directly with each other, which greatly complicates attribution. Identifying a single link in that chain, such as the initial access broker, can open the door to dismantling operations much broader than what looked like an isolated incident.