Grams, the search engine for the black markets

April 22, 2014  By Pierluigi Paganini


It has been officially announced the launch of the beta version of Grams Darknet Market Search Engine specialized for researches in the underground markets.

All my readers know my involvement in the researches conducted on Tor Network, and more in general on the Deep Web. Recently, many events have shocked the Tor community, the revelation on NSA project to track Tor users, the seizure of the Silk Road black market and the arrest of Eric Eoin Marques, the 28-year-old Irishman owner and operator of Freedom Hosting, the principal hosting service within Tor Network.
Many security experts, me included, have spent their effort to make more accessible the Tor Network, to crawl its content and realize a sort of search engine to rapidly makes search within not indexed pages.
The number of hidden services within the Tor network is impressive, many of them unknown to the majority of the users.
Security experts have discovered that the offer of illicit godds in the underground websites is very articulated and dynamic, on daily base new services offer illegal high quality drugs, weapons, hacking tools, and provide illegal services to its customers.
Search them within Tor network is often not so easy, users have to know exactly onion URL of the web resource which is difficult to remember.
Grams is a project for the implementation of a search engine for online underground Black Markets. It was launched in Beta last week at the address http://grams7enufi7jmdl.onion, it could be used by Tor users to easily find website proposing illegal godds including drugs.  Grams’ creator, who uses the nickname of Gramsadmin, announced the release of the beta with a post on Reddit.
Grams Black Market search engine
Let’s do a simple search for “cocaine” term. Grams layout remembers the look of Google, all we need to do is to type it in the search box, exactly like the popular search engine.
Grams Black Market search engine 2
We must consider that Grams searches for content inside Tor network, the creator has designed a specific algorithm to explore the various black markets. In the post that announce the release of the beta version, the administrator informs the users to have included data from The Pirate Market, Mr. Nice Guy and Blank Bank. Currently Grams search engine is crawling results from eight different black markets, including BlackBank, C9, Evolution, Mr. Nice Guy, Pandora, The Pirate Market, and SilkRoad2.“We had to disable Agora for now since they have gone offline, but as soon as they are back their listings will start showing up in the search results again.” said GramsAdmin.

I have no doubt, search engines have an infinite power and I’m sure that the author of Grams will try to expand the capabilities of its platform including data from the other relevant black market. The author has also announced that the Grams will include advertising exactly like Google AdWords, reveling the business model behind the search engine.

“Within the next two weeks Grams will have a system similar to google adwords where vendors can buy keywords and their listings will go to the top of the search results when those keywords are searched for. They will be bordered with an advertisement disclaimer so users know those are paid results.”

Grams is probably a little light that is trying to make inroads into the depths of the black market.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs –  Grams, underground)

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Pierluigi Paganini
Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.





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