( Private ) News Exposed ~YamaGata Darkode - Ode to Lizard Squad (The Rise and Fall of a Private Community)

For the 10 of you who don't know, darkode was on of the most active English-speaking "underground" cybercrime boards. The forum was started around 2009 by a coder named "Iserdo" and gained popularity off the back of Iserdo's bot, "Buterfly bot" (AKA Mariposa), which was sold there.

In The Beginning

With Iserdo as admin, the main focus of darkode was selling and supporting his products; however, the success of butterfly bot lead to a rapid growth in user-base and quickly darkode became a popular malware marketplace, much sought after by English-speaking cybercriminals. As a result of growing popularity, the forum was turned invite-only and existing members were given a number of invites, which they could give out to whomever they chose. Of course the invite-only model just made membership more sought after and gained darkode a reputation as an elite underground forum. At some point around 2010, Iserdo left and the forum was handed over to Crim (the coder of CrimePack which was one of the early exploit kits), who also gave admin to fubar (the seller of the infamous NgrBot).

Access Refines

In march 2012 a new access model was announced, the community became layered with "fresh fish" (level 0) as the basic membership, and "Level 1" (Trusted) as the upgraded membership. For fresh fish access, an applicant would need to be invited by another member, followed by completing an interview with an admin, In order to get level 1 access, existing members would need to prove themselves to the community and if given access, would be able to view/use the level 1 marketplace, which featured more exclusive products. There was also a special "Buyer" level created, which would only allow the user access to the marketplace and not the discussion or coding sections. 

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Lizard Squad

Even I can't explain how darkode got form where it was to here, but we can assume it was for publicity. Around the time LizardSquad became well known by DDoSing just about anything and everything, they decided to follow the same route as lulzsec(setting up a public IRC channel on freenode), unfortunately freenode was having none of this and and banned them, along with everyone in their channel, a few days later. The same week, LizardSquad had relocated to the darkode IRC, which the darkode admin appears to be fine with, he even allowed LizardSquad to spam the darkode url all-over the internet, something that was previously forbidden.


Of course, sharing an IRC only implies the darkode admin tolerated LizardSquad but may not have worked with them. I had noticed that lizardpatrol.com (the official LizardSquad website) was hidden behind cloudflare, so on a hunch I send a HTTP request to the darkode server, with the hostname set to "lizardpatrol.com", and what would you know!

Yamagata Gennosuke