The Dutch police together with the FBI have taken down a large criminal trading platform, with support of multiple cybersecurity experts, including Computest. Furthermore, hundreds of users of this platform have been arrested worldwide. The criminal platform the Genesis Market offered buyers stolen personal data. Computest urges everyone to check if their personal data, like their credit card details and login credentials, has been traded on this platform.
What is the Genesis Market?
The Genesis Market sold stolen user data, such as login credentials. For example, it allowed criminals to buy access to PayPal accounts, e-commerce platforms, investment accounts and credit card information of people worldwide. The login credentials and so called 'online fingerprints' were stolen from computers infected with malware.
The market is suspected to have made more than 2 million victims.
Check your hack
The trading platform was taken down on April 5th by the police. Afterwards, arrests were made in multiple countries. The Dutch police suspects that this platform has thousands of victims in The Netherlands. Therefore, the police have set up a website to check if your personal data was traded here. Go to https://politie.nl/checkyourhack and enter your email address to check the data.
Urgent recommendation in case of stolen data
If it turns out that your personal data was traded on the Genesis Market, then this means criminals have access to your online accounts. To stop this, we recommend following these steps:
- Log out from all your accounts in your browser. Make sure you sign out on your (work) email account, PayPal-account, and your accounts on cryptocurrency exchanges.
- Reinstall your computer. To make sure the attackers do not regain their access it is important to perform this step and in this sequence.
- Change the password for all your online accounts. Use a password manager to create strong and unique passwords for each website.
Extra information about the investigation
Do you want to know more about Computest’s contribution to the police investigation or the technical details?
- Read more about the research process and Computest’s support
- Read more about the technical details about this investigation