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

Tough break for Trump Administration...

[__aaclcg7560]

The FBI will have to find a new way to entrap people into child poornography, as they operate all the child pornography websites on the Internet.

Re:Tough break for Trump Administration...

[__aaclcg7560]

When you say ALL, did you really mean it?

I read it on /., so it must be true.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/11/11/2138201/fbi-operated-23-tor-hidden-child-porn-sites-deployed-malware-from-them

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". ]

Re:Good job

[SciFurz]

how the hell do you get sexual satisfaction out of swallowing somebody whole?

Welcome to human nature.
I guess this fetish is sort of like the one for asphyxiation. The thrill of getting close to death or dying.

Anything that can cause a physical reaction can also be a trigger for a sexual reaction when the link has established in the brain. It might be best for your sanity to not search for these things on internet.

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

[Notabadguy]

You had me for the first two thirds of your post, but then the words both stopped being words, and stopped being assembled in a fashion resembling a sentence, so your overall thought was lost.

Re:Irony

[Oligonicella]

Cmdln Daco gave you the biological reason, here's a moral one: What is happening to these children is equivalent to someone, say you, being taken and tortured and forced to perform sexual acts. My guess is you would very much want someone to intervene and then punish. So do the children. I would also add that it's not a panic at all but a cold decision that the law looks at those people especially dark because the children are incapable of defending themselves and many times of even speaking out.

I believe you're laboring under the assumption that someone who supports the idea that you shouldn't be tracked needlessly across your web travels must also support people directly harming children or providing cover in digital form for those that do. This is not the case.

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:Irony

[strikethree]

Where public justice fails private 'Anonymous' action can still succeed.

Vigilante Justice: Always torturing the correct person. GG WP.

Meh. As long as someone suffers terribly for a crime not being properly addressed through official channels. The situation is even better when the person being tortured didn't actually do it but is socially unpopular anyways. The reason being is that TWO problems have been taken care of, not just one. Of course, the original criminal is still out there ready to do evil again, but that is just random. There is no way to take care of that. Fuck yeah! Vigilante Justice for the win.

The Commons

[labnet]

Let's say that I do get tortured and abused, and someone gets pictures of it and puts them online, say in liveleak, or even in some "well respected" news site. Who is responsible for torturing me? The one who did it? Or the jerks who hosted the pics?

They are both responsible, provided no party is a common carrier.

I read a very interesting article recently on the law of the commons. It essentially said that knowing someones real identity in a public commons, makes for polite (read socially acceptable) behaviour. This is why facebook is generally very polite; but anonymous blog comments can be abusive.

The issue is, we have a great tussle between our valid fear of governments, and even private businesses, abusing their knowledge of you; and our need as a society to protect those that cannot protect themselves by revealing the identity of those that abuse. This is not only children, but the elderly, and those with physical and mental impairments.

There is currently no answer to this problem as the two requirements will always oppose each other.

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.