Anonymous Takes Down 10,613 Dark Web Portals (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Anonymous hackers have breached Freedom Hosting II, a popular Dark Web hosting provider, and have taken down 10,613 .onion sites. In a message left on all Freedom Hosting II sites, the hackers claim to have found massive troves of child pornography imagery hosted on the company's servers. The hackers dumped 74GB of server files (half of which they say contained child pornography) and a database dump of 2.3GB. Security researcher Chris Monteiro has analyzed some of the dumped data. He says he discovered .onion URLs hosting botnets, fraud sites, sites peddling hacked data, weird fetish portals, more weird stuff, and child abuse websites targeting both English- and Russian-speaking buyers. Freedom Hosting II hosts about a fifth of all .onion URLs. The first Freedom Hosting service was targeted by Anonymous in 2011 and eventually shut down in 2013 after the FBI also found child pornography hosted on its sites.

Comments

Re:Good job

[ArmoredDragon]

Well, in all of this, I did learn a new word: Vorarephilia.

At some point, you have to wonder: How on earth do people come up with these different philias? Some things you can kind of understand at some level, like necrophilia and zoophilia because the requisite body parts are at least present in some form...but how the hell do you get sexual satisfaction out of swallowing somebody whole?

Re:Misidentification of "sexual" stimuli

[hackwrench]

The problem is one of taxonomy. When certain impulses are usually triggered by sex, they are labeled sexual, no matter whether the fact remains that they can be triggered by other neurological pathways. A lot of the social arguments are ones of taxonomy. Whether or not someone is male or female, or the less appealing classification of neuter, or whether the bonding of two or more individuals should be classified under the term, "marriage". ]

Irony

[lucasnate1]

Anonymous are attacking a hosting service that allows people to host things anonymously? Weren't these guys touted as the anti-establishment pro-freedom guys? Why does "FOR THE CHILDREN!!!" suddently the basic freedoms of all the non child abusers in the service?

Re:Irony

[rtb61]

'Anonymous' is anyone who wants to take a political action through the name of 'Anonymous'. So 'Anonymous' quite legitimately can be a team of FBI Agents and NSA agents who felt there were a group of foreign web sites that could not touch but that could be brought down by exposure, not quite legal but certainly within the spirit of 'Anonymous'. Where public justice fails private 'Anonymous' action can still succeed.

Re:Wiener wasn't entrapped, he tweeted publicly

[Kjella]

Now, it is true that the standard reasoning given for why possession (as opposed to production) of child pornography is illegal is very much at odds with the idea of keeping the site live, in that they're ostensibly re-victimizing those portrayed in the CP sites they permit to live.

From what I understand operating a site means they didn't just enable people to download what was already posted, but also to continue creating new posts and distribute more material. I think the best analogy would probably be knowing about a drug smuggling tunnel and take over operation with undercover agents rather than shut it down, even though they can't control what is smuggled or where it'd end up.

Nobody is entrapped, because it takes bad intent to use a smuggling tunnel in the first place. The drug lord and the junkie would still exist and they'd find other routes, but how responsible are you if the junkie OD'd on drugs you intentionally let through? Morally, it stinks pretty bad. Legally, no tunnel operator could pin all the blame on the mules. The cops are in on the conspiracy, they have their share of the guilt for the results.