Solaris, a large darknet marketplace focused on drugs and illegal substances, has been taken over by a smaller competitor named ‘Kraken,’ who claims to have hacked it on January 13, 2022.
The Tor site of Solaris currently redirects to Kraken, while blockchain monitoring experts at Elliptic report no movements in the cryptocurrency addresses associated with the site after January 13, 2022.
The Solaris marketplace emerged a few months ago, following the seizure of Hydra, attempting to capture a portion of the then-disturbed market. The new market quickly captured about 25% of the market and processed roughly $150,000,000 in illegal sales.
At the start of the year, a Resecurity report on the emergence of novel drug markets claimed that Solaris had received 60,000 new registrations since Hydra’s sudden demise, while Kraken only absorbed about 10% of that.
Solaris was a Russian-speaking platform reportedly affiliated with Killnet, a pro-Kremlin hacktivist group that launched several DDoS attacks against organizations in the western world in 2022.
