Cyber-thieves turn to 'invisible net' to set up attacks
Cyber-thieves are creating an "invisible internet" to stop police spying on cyber-crime deals being done on the dark net, research suggests. Instead of trading on marketplaces, criminals have turned to "gated" chat forums, invitation-only communities and encrypted apps, say researchers. The change could make it hard for law enforcement agencies to spot and trace attacks, they warn. They also found a large increase in attacks aimed at big companies. Hidden chatter The study embedded undercover researchers into a wide variety of forums and gated chat forums on the dark net. The dark net is the part of the internet not accessible to search engines such as Google, and for which people need a special browser to visit. The most well-known dark net is accessed via the Tor browser. Successful efforts by police to infiltrate dark net marketplaces as well as raids that saw many of them closed down, had pushed criminal hackers to adopt more secure ways of comm