Notorious cybercrime forum Darkode has risen from the ashes of its Government take down and is set to return to the web.

News of the revival of the site came via a Darkode admin who goes by the name of  “Sp3cial1st” who is said to have been notable by his absence on the lists of those arrested by global law enforcement agencies during raids earlier this month.

“Most of the staff is intact, along with senior members,” the message from Sp3cial1st read. “It appears the raids focused on newly added individuals or people that have been retired from the scene for years.”

The admin then went on to explain that the returned from the dead new version of the site will have significant changes from the version taken down, including a restriction that the forum will now be invite only, and previous members of the site that can be confirmed to be still active will be the only people given an invite.

A forum user by the name of MalwareTech explained further:

The new format, with all members having their own onion address would allow the Darkode admins greater control over who gets access, preventing people from accessing a hacked account without the owner’s onion url. It would also allow them to better monitor who views what by creating an individual log file for each onion, meaning they could quickly weed out leakers.

Bitcoin Blockchain confirmation

One interesting addition to the returning Darkode will be that they will only allow previous members back after they have gone through verification process based on the Blockchain API that powers Bitcoin, and that further they would be storing a hash of users’ Bitcoin Wallet addresses as the only link to their registration.

In theory, allowing authentication through a Bitcoin wallet address would prevent scammers from accessing the forum as private key access tied to a user’s Bitcoin wallet address would be needed to get in the front door.

The return of Darkode really shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to anyone, although the quickness of its return, given the worldwide arrests of people who were allegedly running the site, would probably qualify for a speed record.

As we wrote at the time of the global law enforcement raids, taking down sites like Darkode is similar to swatting a mosquito on a tropical island, sure you killed one, but there’s plenty more of them out there, although in this case it turns out that the individual mosquito is also a zombie.

Image credit: Darkode screenshot