Darknet hackers of India mint bitcoins from illegal tasks

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Joy D’Souza is a freelance website designer, 20-year-old computer science graduate, and a darknet hacker. This indicates that he operates in a substitute universe of Internet where many stuffs are against the law and not simply accessible to people.

He belongs to a tiny but developing tribe in India that gets handful amount from task such as electronically spying on a rival or breaking into Facebook or email accounts, somewhat analogous to usual illegal or black hat hackers. Most of them are computer science or engineering students or young workers with day jobs, confident that the encrypted universe that they work in will not compromise them.

D’Souza tells of having breached into a computer of a politician. “I got paid almost 0.20 bitcoins (or almost $800) for this job,” claimed D’Souza, to the media employing a false name similar to the other hackers that the media spoke with regarding this report. “The costing ranges on the level of urgency and difficulty.” The darknet can be authorized by software dubbed as TOR to anonymously look through hidden websites as well as gain control to both illegal and legal services from hackers, amid different activities. The TOR network is a cluster of volunteer-working servers that enables users to improve their security and privacy on the Internet by separating routing and identification.

“You normally have no sign who your hacker is unless you turn out to be a standard client and make some type of trust, but normally we have faith no one,” claimed a 28-year-old with a day job as a consultant for one of biggest tech firms in India by day and a regular darknet hacker, Rahul Panwar, to the media in an interview. For simple jobs such as hacking Facebook and email accounts, the hackers take almost $100–250 in bitcoins. For more difficult tasks such as spying into a computer of somebody, the charges are $600–700, or more if the person to be spied is of high-profile and reputation. For hacking a web server, the cost is almost $1,000 in bitcoins. “And for a targeted assault on a particular company or user, a hacker might charge almost $2,000 in bitcoins,” claimed Sheena Seth, an industry analyst.