Belarusian police recently shut down an underground forum that had been a key marketplace in the Russian-speaking cybercrime scene since 2012. The forum, called XakFor, was used for the distribution of malware, botnets and other cybercrime services. Unlike the vast majority of similar platforms, XakFor operated on the open, indexed web, instead of the dark web.
While XakFor started as an exclusive, invite-only forum frequented by people at the top of the cybercrime scene, it evolved over the years and eventually became an open forum visited mostly by threat actors with limited technical knowledge and skills. Before the shutdown, XakFor had 28,000 registered accounts and was visited by thousands of users every day.
Read more: Belarusian police shut down notorious hacking forum
