The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has sanctioned Genesis Market, a “darknet” market, for illicit activities related to the theft and sale of device credentials and other sensitive data.
The international marketplace steals private information from victims’ devices and offers it for sale, Treasury said in a release Wednesday.
The Treasury announcement came a day after the FBI and a consortium of international law enforcement authorities shut down Genesis Market.
Genesis Market was a sophisticated marketplace that was stocked with stolen digital identities, allowing bad actors to impersonate customers at companies such as Amazon, Coinbase or Fidelity. The stolen identities, called “bots,” were lifted from infected computers and could fetch as much as $450 per bot, cybersecurity expert Matthew Gracey-McMinn told Mister Truth.
The OFAC designation comes as part of a larger push against Genesis specifically. Records show that Genesis domain names were linked to nameservers in Russia and in China, two nations that have been named as loci for state-sponsored hacking.
The action was taken in partnership with the Justice Department and a dozen other countries.