Markets: TheRealDeal

TheRealDeal was a dark-net marketplace launched in early 2015 that was a part of the cyber-arms industry and was intended primarily for brokering hacking/cracking services, zero-day exploits, hacking tools, exploit code, databases and everything related to cyberattacks, but it also allowed for the sale of drugs, fraud-related items, and other things not related to cyberattacks. Some of the most notable things sold on the TheRealDeal were the login credentials for 200 million hacked Yahoo accounts being sold for 3 Bitcoin worth approximately 1,800 dollars during the time, and various zero-day exploits, which many people believed to be fraudulent due to the fact that they were listed for well below their true value.

In an interview with DeepDotWeb, its’ administrators stated that they founded the site in direct response to the amount of dark-net websites that have emerged that have no purpose or are nothing more than scams, implying that they wanted them to be taken down by cyber attacks. On July 15 of 2015, the site went offline for 24 hours during the same time as the FBI’s seizure of the Dark0de forum. The site went down for months for unknown reasons beginning on August 24 of 2015, and later announced its’ reopening on DeepDotWeb on December 1. When users attempted to access TheRealDeal at times during September of 2016, they were displayed a message informing them that the site was under a DDoS attack. Later in November it permanently shut down. Roughly four years later, a cybersecurity author, Vinny Troia, provided an analysis of TheRealDeal’s MySQL database, which revealed that two out of the sites’ three administrators belonged to The Dark Overlord hacking group.