Insider Trading is nothing but an illegal practice of trading on the stock exchange to one’s own advantage through having access to confidential information. Selling the employer’s secrets are usual in the dark web but there is an unusual way a website dedicated to white-collar crime, leading more insiders to peddle confidential information.
RedOwl and Insights, the security firms reports that the activity of the company insiders on ‘dark web’ sites has doubled and threatened both the consumers and investors. The sites on the dark web can be accessed only via Tor browsers, where the members buy and sell information about business data and corporate earnings.
Dark Web traders earn $5000 a month by insider trading and through access-related corporate crimes. As per the reports by thehill, “KickAss Marketplace” website advertise them as a members-only place to go for insider corporate information. And the ‘Kickass Forum’ averages five posts a week, resulting in 40 bitcoins worth of transactions ($35,000), which vets each post for accuracy, costs 1 bitcoin a year to join.
The forums also offer more platform to sell insider information and host recruitment posts to find various company employees to implant malware into the corporate servers or participate in credit card theft schemes. The other forms mainly focus on insider trading.
‘Stock Market Insiders’ the other dark web insider trading website that focuses on improving the opportunities for traders and also other forms of corporate crime.
They also recruit employees with high technical knowledge to gain access to corporate servers and the bank accounts. Here is another screenshot from fortune, showing a conversation between a criminal recruiter and a bank employee:
Such activities have also produced a booming segment of the cyber-security industry dedicated to stopping them.
There is an increased prevalence of insider recruitment targets U.K. banks since May 2016, as per the Flashpoint analysts.