OpenAlt 2026

Malware kits, stolen credit cards, botnets for rent, “hack any phone” guides. On darknet marketplaces, cybercrime is sold like any other online product, with vendor ratings, escrow and customer support.
For my master’s thesis, I monitored three live darknet markets every three days for a month and collected about 1,600 Cybercrime-as-a-Service products from 74 vendors. This talk is a tour of that economy from the inside. It covers how Tor, PGP and cryptocurrency combine to make anonymous trade possible, how markets with no courts and no police still manage to build trust, and how such data can be collected safely and ethically. It also covers what the data actually show. Prices depend on how easy a product is to copy, not on how much damage it can do. Markets that look different turn out to sell much the same things at much the same prices. And the biggest vendors quietly run shops on several markets at once, often under names already known from earlier marketplaces.