Genesis Market, which hosted around 80 million credentials and digital fingerprints stolen from over two million people, was taken offline following a coordinated operation, dubbed Operation Cookie Monster, involving 17 countries.

Led by the FBI and Dutch National Police, authorities made 120 arrests, carried out over 200 searches and took close to 100 pieces of "preventative activity" across the globe.

Genesis Market traded in digital identities, selling ‘bots’ that contained information harvested from victim devices, which had been infected using malicious attacks. The bots would give criminals access to all the data pertaining to an individual identity, such as cookies, saved logins and autofill form data.

The price per bot would range from as little as $0.70 up to several hundreds of dollars for those containing financial information, which would allow access to online banking accounts.

The market provided users with a custom browser, which would mimic that of their victim. This allowed the criminals to essentially masquerade as the victim, making it look like they were accessing their accounts from the usual location and operating system.

Rob Jones from the UK's National Crime Agency says: "Behind every cyber criminal or fraudster is the technical infrastructure that provides them with the tools to execute their attacks and the means to benefit financially from their offending.

"Genesis Market was a prime example of such a service and was one of the most significant platforms on the criminal market. Its removal will be a huge blow to criminals across the globe."