Presented at
DEF CON 33 (2025),
Aug. 10, 2025, 11 a.m.
(45 minutes).
Four years ago, Chris found a vulnerability with a murder for hire site on the dark net. He could exploit that vulnerability to intercept the murder orders that were being placed: names, addresses, pattern of life information, photos, and, in some cases, bitcoin payments. He reached out to Carl for help, and a small team was built in secret to intercept and triage these orders. However, after their warnings to the police fell on deaf ears, they ultimately decided to warn the targets on the kill list directly. After an initial series of successes, the investigation expanded rapidly and they formed a global cooperation with the FBI and police forces around the world, resulting over 175 murder orders being disclosed, 34 arrests 28 convictions and over 180 years of prison time being sentenced. This talk will be about those years: about the dangers and threats the team had to navigate, the times of isolation when the police wouldn’t take them seriously, about raids in Romania to uncover the cyber-criminal gang running the site and the psychological impact of racing against time to try to stop people getting murdered.
References:
- This talk draws on a podcast series called Kill List, published here: [link]https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/kill-list/id1769072368)
Presenters:
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Carl Miller
Carl Miller is a technologist, journalist and writer. He is the founder of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos and the information integrity lab CASM Technology, a Visiting Fellow at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and a Senior Research Fellow at RAND Europe. He is the author of the The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab which won the Transmission Prize, and is the co-writer and host of the podcast Kill List, which reached #1 in seven countries. It was named the Guardian’s best podcast of 2024, named Podcast of the Year 2025 by the Broadcast Press Guild Awards and was nominated for an Aria and Ambie
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Chris Monteiro
Chris is a dark web investigator, ethical hacker and systems administrator for a major company based in London.