Search Engine Aims to Make Dark Markets More Accessible

An anonymous developer has created a search engine for the Dark Web that will make searching for questionable and illegal goods and services easier, borrowing from the previously popular Grams search engine that shut down two years ago, according to an analysis of the service published today by Digital Shadows.

The search engine, dubbed Kilos, borrows a lot of design elements from and improves on the functionality of the Grams search engine, extensively indexing six different dark markets. While other search engines have appeared over the past few years — such as Ahmia, Onion Search Engine, and Fresh Onions — Kilos appears to trump them in terms of functionality, says Alex Guirakhoo, strategy and research analyst at Digital Shadows, a provider of risk protection solutions.

"Since 2017 there have been several Dark Web search engines that each offer varying levels of functionality ... many of these have been fairly basic and incomprehensive in their coverage," he says. "Kilos has received a lot of attention on both cybercriminal and mainstream platforms due to its customizability and range of sources."

The Grams search engine used custom APIs to collect information on products and services sold in a handful of major dark markets. Such markets are made up of sellers of gray market and black market goods and services on the Dark Web, which uses TOR or another anonymization service to keep users identities and the source of  transactions a secret. In addition, the developers had paired the service with a bitcoin "tumbler" or "mixer," a method of combining bitcoin transactions into pools to anonymize the identities of the buyers. 

In December 2017, the search engine shut down due to the difficulty in collecting information and the burden of maintaining the site, Digital Shadows stated in the analysis. Yet the bitcoin mixer service, named Helix, attracted the attention of US federal prosecutors, which led to the indictment of 36-year-old Larry Harmon of Akron, Ohio, in February on three counts of money laundering and financial crimes for anonymizing more than $300 million in transactions. 

"The sole purpose of Harmon's operation was to conceal criminal transactions from law enforcement on the Darknet, and because of our growing expertise in this area, he could not make good on that promise," said Don Fort, chief, IRS Criminal Investigation, in a statement announcing the charges on Feb. 13. "Working in tandem with other sites, he sought to be the 'go-to' money launderer on the Darknet, but our investigators once again played the role of criminal disrupters, unraveling the interlinked web from one tentacle to another."

Kilos' developer appears to be following Harmon's playbook. In addition to the search engine functionality, the developer also announced its own bitcoin mixing service, dubbed "Krumble." 

"According to the Kilos administrator, Krumble takes great effort in ensuring user anonymity compared with other Bitcoin mixers by randomizing the transaction and commission fees, enforcing a randomized transaction delay, and only operating over TOR," stated Digital Shadows in its advisory.

The company theorizes that the two projects may have some of the same backers or developers. The similarities extend just beyond the design of the sites and the pairing of a search engine with a cryptocurrency mixer, says Digital Shadows' Guirakhoo.

"If the two do not share the same creator, it's also possible that Kilos' design seeks to capitalize on the popularity of Grams," he says. "This is common with cybercriminal marketplaces."

In addition, to help prevent denial-of-service attacks and competitors from scraping, the developers of Kilos have implemented a CAPTCHA that asks users to rank product and vendor feedback by whether the review is positive or negative. The CAPTCHA serves a secondary function as well, giving the developers additional data to train the software's machine learning algorithm and improve the search function, Guirakhoo says.

"The site's administrator uses the responses to train the search engine's sentiment classifier, which rates results based on an assigned sentiment value to help ensure the highest quality listings are prioritized," he says.

The service gives defenders a view into how illegal and gray market sellers and services continue to improve. Digital Shadows predicts that the service will continue to improve, but given US investigators' takedown of the Grams and Helix services, Kilos and Krumble tempt a similar fate, Guirakhoo says.

"Unlike legitimate software, there is little incentive for the creators of ethically questionable services to be transparent in their development," he says. "These are typically homegrown projects, managed by a select few individuals."

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