Insider trading has found a prosperous breeding ground in the so-called dark web, as a number of marketplaces have emerged to sell corporate secrets to dodgy traders.

U.S. risk management firm RedOwl Analytics and Israeli threat intelligence company IntSights said in a new report published Wednesday that the dark web marketplaces enable insider trading by selling access to corporate systems, resources and other leaked information. On one of the most popular markets, the Kick Ass Marketplace (pictured), researchers even found evidence of staff at an unnamed bank working with hackers to infect their employer’s network with malware.

Kick Ass Marketplace offers a subscription service to clients for the price of one bitcoin per month. This gives clients access to a variety of “vetted and accurate” insider information that’s posted onto the site. Each of these posts is also assigned a “confidence rating,” together with advice on whether to buy and sell stock in the associated company, allowing clients to cash in on the insider secrets.

Back in May, an administrator of Kick Ass Marketplace going by the pseudonym “h3x” was interviewed by DeepDotWeb, revealing that the site had 15 investment firm members, 25 subscribers and two trading analysts who observe financial markets and verify the integrity of stolen data before it’s posted for sale.

RedOwl and IntSights’ report, Monetizing the Insider: The Growing Symbiosis of Insiders and the Dark Web, says the site posts up around five new “high confidence” insider reports each week, and earns around $35,800 a week in subscription fees.

And Kick Ass isn’t the only such marketplace around that’s doing a thriving business. A second site, called The Stock Insiders, has a different modus operandi, recruiting retail store staff to help facilitate stolen credit card transactions for goods that can easily be resold, such as Apple iPhones. In addition, it helps to pair up hackers with company insiders, allowing them to work together to infect corporate systems with malware.

The report warns that insider recruitment is growing fast, with chatter from public and private forums on the subject doubling over the last year.

“The dark web has created a market for employees to easily monetize insider access,” the report said. “[It] serves as a vehicle [for] insiders to use to cash out on their services through insider trading and payment for stolen credit cards. Sophisticated threat actors use the dark web to find and engage insiders to help place malware behind an organisation’s perimeter security [and] as a result, any insider with access to the internal network, regardless of technical capability or seniority, presents a risk.”

RedOwl said the report shows that organizations cannot rely on a security strategy that’s focused solely on external threats to their systems and data, but must instead develop insider threat programs to ward off internal threats as well.

Image courtesy of Kick Ass Marketplace