Authored by Chris Summers via The Epoch Times(emphasis ours),

In June 2025, police in Europe shut down a darknet marketplace for drugs called Archetyp Market, which had more than 600,000 users, and the following month the FBI announced thatOperation Grayskull had led to the sentencing of 18 offenders to a total of 300 years for offensesrelating to child sexual abuse material on the darknet.

The FBI maintains a Joint Criminal Opioid and Darknet Enforcement team, and in May 2025 itannouncedthat 270 people had been arrested globally as part of Operation RapTor and that hundreds of pounds of fentanyl had been seized as part of an operation targeting drug traffickers on darknet websites.

Butexperts say the darknet—sometimes known as thedark web—keeps growing and is home to millions of megabytes of personal data, which are used by cybercriminals andransomwaregangs.

“You would be amazed how much personal data is drifting around on the darknet just from breach notifications,” Bob Erdman, associate vice president of research and development at cybersecurity company Fortra, based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, told The Epoch Times.

“It seems like every month you get a new breach notification from some company or website you’ve interacted with, and all those little pieces keep getting assembled to build a profile of you, and then get resold to someone who’s either going to try [to] attack you or try and use you to attack somebody else,” Erdman said.

“When I speak with older Americans, many are shocked by the types of data on the darknet and how often it’s exposed or traded,” Chris Nyhuis, CEO at Vigilant, an Ohio-based cybersecurity firm and a human trafficking investigator, told The Epoch Times in an email.

“For younger more technical generations there is ... often a sense of resignation,” Nyhuis said. “They’ve grown up with breaches, so data exposure feels almost inevitable to them.”

“Data released on the darknet is not a darknet problem, it just makes distributing data easier,” Nyhuis said.

He said he believes that companies are still not protecting data well enough.

Source: ZeroHedge News