PROLOGUE

impossible to establish fully what was really going on between the players, and with whom they were ultimately working.

The Internet has generated unfathomable stores of data and information, a large percentage of which is valueless, a large percentage of which remains uninterpreted, and a small percentage of which is dangerous in its falsity. Our growing dependence on networked systems and the interconnectedness that sees highly specialised groups like hackers and intelligence agents migrate between crime, industrial espionage and cyber warfare means that documenting and trying to understand the history of phenomena like DarkMarket has become a vital intellectual and social exercise, even if the evidence is partial, tendentious and scattered both in the virtual and the real world.