DarkWeb Economy: Buzzwords or Unique Ecosystem?

Is the darkweb just a buzzword? Or is it a way of thinking with unique language and terminology? This was just one of the questions that came up at at the Dark-Web Economy conference held Wednesday in Tel Aviv by Herzog Fox & Neeman and Herzog Strategic, in partnership with CTech by Calcalist held last week in Tel Aviv.

At the event, topics including the darknet, criminal activity, intelligence operations, the technology companies that operate in the darknet, and the legal aspects of darknet operations, were brought up by Nimrod Kozlovski, partner at Israel-based law firm Herzog Fox Neeman and lecturer at Tel Aviv University. “Darknet has grown in importance for criminal activity. It became the central marketplace for selling stolen information and stolen goods and also for trading hacking tools,” he said.

According to Yitzhak Vager, VP of product, management and business development at Verint Cyber Security Solutions, “sensitive organizations nowadays need to be more proactive and understand that it's not enough to defend their own in order to reduce their risk,” adding that “what we do is that we collect intelligence outside of the organizations, from different sources, from the open web, from the deep web, and from the dark web, and taking that information can be used in order to refine threat hunting within the organizations, and look for specific attacks.”

Menny Barzillay, partner and head of cyber at Herzog Strategic said that “like any other industry, the crime industry is looking to innovate and improve its business models and its ways to actually conduct crime. Bitcoin solved the biggest problem that criminals had, which was how to monetize crime in a secure way for them. Bitcoin is like cash money that you can actually send over the internet and this is one of the strongest drivers for crime today.”

Itai Yonat, founder and CEO of cybersecurity startup Intercept 9500 presented a different and slightly cynical opinion, saying that the darknet is just a buzzword, and it is one of many platforms for internet criminals