Joining these rooms requires infiltration, and the creation of fake, credible online profiles.įinally, malicious actors tend to move from one channel to another regularly. Instead, users must find links to chat rooms, and click on them to join the rooms.Īnother challenge is that many chat rooms are private, meaning moderators must accept new join requests. Finding these chat rooms is difficult because ICQ does not offer a universal search engine. Some are extremely large, while others only have a few dozen members. There are thousands of chat rooms involved in various criminal activities. Chat rooms can be public or private, and share text as well as images, videos, files and audio recordings.Ĭhannel hopping makes it difficult to keep track of the criminal underground ICQ also has chat rooms where up to thousands of participants converge. ICQ provides the ability to search for participants by name, and to exchange private messages. ICQ participants operate therefore with a certain sense of anonymity, and impunity. Being hosted in Russia, Western law enforcement receive little to no cooperation from its operators when sending mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) letters, and warrants.

The network went underground for a number of years, and was resuscitated by a Russian company. I used ICQ back in the 1990s during my high school years to keep in touch with my friends. For the benefit of our demonstration, we will use the ICQ network.

The aim of this blog post is to help you get a better grasp as to how chat rooms are used, and why your company should pay attention to them. There is still much uncertainty around what these chat rooms are, and are not.

These communities have however been the target of several police operations and, coupled with the technical challenges of using the dark web, there have been growing signs that the most dynamic communities are now hosted on chat rooms on Discord, Telegram and ICQ. The dark web is host to many dynamic malicious actor communities. Our years of monitoring the dark web have helped better understand what it is, and most importantly, is not. Over the past decade, the dark web has attracted much of the attention in the security field as the premier source of threats for companies.

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