Hack Brings Down 10,000 "Dark Web" Sites

Steven Bogos

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Jan 17, 2013
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Hack Brings Down 10,000 "Dark Web" Sites

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The Anonymous-linked hacker claims he has brought down one fifth of the entire "Dark Web".

If you've never heard of the "Dark Web" - a secret encrypted network that exists between Tor servers and their clients - it's probably for the best. A hotbed of illegal activity, including drug deals, assassins for hire, and child pornography, it really highlights the lows of humanity. Well today, it's gotten a little bit smaller, as an Anonymous-linked hacker speaking to Motherboard [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/talking-to-the-hacker-who-took-down-a-fifth-of-the-dark-web] claims to have brought down about 10,000 sites, or about a fifth of the total service.

The hack specifically targeted a Dark Web hosting service, Freedom Hosting II, after discovering that it was hosting a substantial amount of child pornography. Usually, FHII only allows 256MB of data to be hosted per site but the hacker soon discovered that there were gigabytes of porn being hosted - a sign that the hosting service knew about the porn and allowed it to continue.

Reportedly, the attack wasn't difficult. The hacker only needed to have control over a site (new or existing) to get started. After that, it was mostly a matter of modifying a configuration file, triggering a password reset and getting root access.

The hacker said he plans to hand over all the data he obtained from the hosting service to a security researcher who will hand it over to the proper authorities.

Source: Engadget [https://www.engadget.com/2017/02/05/hack-knocks-out-fifth-of-dark-web/]

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TelosSupreme

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If this is true, then kudos to Mr. Anon. Anything to help stop or slow down this kind of activity is always good.
 

The Rogue Wolf

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Not to disparage the hacker's work here, it's fantastic... but will many law-enforcement agencies be able to use the data as evidence for prosecution? Most first-world governments have laws forbidding any evidence not gained through proper channels and methods from being used in trials- I'm just not sure where this particular situation sits in regards to that.
 

Igor-Rowan

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And the flashbacks to Welcome to the Game return, a game about the dark web and a very compelling case about why you should never go there.
 

RebornKusabi

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Mar 11, 2009
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I'll be real here: he's a hero.

Considering what the darknet is used for (seriously, child rape porn and black markey gun transactions are just two of the things it's used for), I don't feel sorry for these web sites.

I read an well-sourced Wired article a couple of years ago about what FBI agents had to do get into these child porn sex rings and the difficulty is that most of them require you submit your own... "work" before they'll let you in. And even then, the difficulty is finding location* and identification for the rapists. It's not any mystery why most of these people hate the job.

*Darknet browsers like Tor obfuscate your location when you browse, I can't remember how... either massive encryption, port cycling- switching web traffic from port 80 to less used or unused one or something else- I would have to double-check), and most people who use it will opt for also using VPN to further cover their tracks. It makes finding REAL darknet users hard.
 

Schadrach

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RebornKusabi said:
*Darknet browsers like Tor obfuscate your location when you browse, I can't remember how... either massive encryption, port cycling- switching web traffic from port 80 to less used or unused one or something else- I would have to double-check), and most people who use it will opt for also using VPN to further cover their tracks. It makes finding REAL darknet users hard.
TOR uses layered encryption and complicated routing. It's literally "The Onion Router". Basically, each packet is routed through a series of nodes on the network, each node except for the endpoints receives an encrypted packet containing where to send it to and a piece of data that is itself an encrypted packet. The source node wraps the content up in all these layers of encryption and routing info, and the destination node decrypts the last layer of encryption and has the actual data.

The basic premise is that if my node receives some number of packets and sends some number out, you know most of those are just being routed (some may originate or end with me), but it's hard to tell which incoming packets match which outgoing packets, because they are all encrypted with different keys.
 

008Zulu_v1legacy

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Law enforcement already knew about these websites. They monitor them, and use them to track individuals in order to legally prosecute them. All this hacker has done is make it more difficult to find these perverts.
 

jklinders

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Sep 21, 2010
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Good on them. Nice to see Anonymous showing rather than telling. I'm also a little surprised they still have proper hackers running under their banner. Looked for a while like they only had script kiddies and botnet renters left.
 

Yeshe

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Mar 1, 2011
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Don't get too excited too quick. A reliable professional publication, heise, in germany writes:
"It can't be determined which kind of content was behind the offers. The statement of the hacker, a big part of the data being illegal sexual content, can't be verified."

(in german) https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Attacke-aufs-Dark-Web-legt-viele-Dienste-lahm-3617912.html
"Kaum zu ermitteln ist jedoch, welche Inhalte hinter den Angeboten standen. Die Angabe der Hacker, ein Gro?teil der Daten seien Darstellungen von Kindesmissbrauch gewesen, l?sst sich nicht verifizieren."
 
Apr 5, 2008
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They need to make a Hollywood movie about this guy, but with a female FBI agent investigating him, a race against the clock, a car chase and the CEO of the hosting company being thrown out of the top floor office with a witty one-liner.