Cybercriminals Taken Down in International FBI Sting

The FBI teamed with numerous countries to bring down one of the net's most prominent illegal marketplaces.

Globally, cybercrime cost $8.4 trillion in 2022, according to some estimates. That number is expected to jump to $10.5 trillion by 2025, according to Cybercrime Magazine.

But while the world may be losing the war on cybercrime, the FBI and some European counterparts announced that they won a battle this week. 

The FBI announced that operation "Cookie Monster" was a success and that law enforcement has seized Genesis Market, one of the most notorious hacker exchanges in the world.

Genesis Market brought together buyers and sellers of hacked logins and digital browser fingerprints. 

Law enforcement agencies from the UK, Europe, Australia, Canada, Germany, Poland and Sweden joined the FBI in the enforcement action which featured the arrest of 120 people. 

According to TechCrunch, the UK National crime Agency arrested 19 suspected site users while the FBI would not comment on exactly how many arrests have been made. 

"This is the biggest operation of its kind. We’re not just going after administrators or taking sites down; we’re going after users on a global scale," an FBI official told the news service. 

Officials have identified about 59,000 people who used the marketplace. 

Genesis Market is an invitation-only online marketplace that has been active since 2017. It sells stolen credentials, cookies and digital browser fingerprints that have been gathered from compromised systems, according to TechCrunch. 

These fingerprints include IP addresses, session cookies, plugins and operating system details which enable hackers to impersonate the victims of the theft. 

Estimates of cybercrime costs typically include damaged or destroyed data, stolen money, the loss of productivity, theft of intellectual property, embezzlement, fraud and more.