Popular Dark Web Hosting Provider Got Hacked, 6,500 Sites Down (zdnet.com)

Daniel's Hosting, one of the largest providers of Dark Web hosting services, was hacked this week and taken offline, ZDNet reports. From a report: The hack took place on Thursday, November 15, according to Daniel Winzen, the software developer behind the hosting service. "As per my analysis it seems someone got access to the database and deleted all accounts," he said in a message posted on the DH portal today. Winzen said the server's root account was also deleted, and that all 6,500+ Dark Web services hosted on the platform are now gone. "Unfortunately, all data is lost and per design, there are no backups," Winzen told ZDNet in an email today. "I will bring my hosting back up once the vulnerability has been identified and fixed."

Comments

No backups?!

[fbobraga]

all data is lost and per design, there are no backups Wow

Re:No backups?!

[Tuidjy]

By design.

I find it quite surprising, as well. It's easier to secure backups than it is to secure an Internet facing server... as the host learned, incidentally.

I can't trust someone to make backups and store them safely, I probably would not I trust him host my server.

Re:No backups?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty sure that they are trying to prevent a government from getting a court order to access their backup tapes, which would allow them access to all historical communications, etc... Much more information than they would keep on a running server.

That said, they should plan on running the old hardware through a chipper-shredder and re-building on a completely different hardware and OS than they were running on before.

Re:No backups?!

[ShanghaiBill]

I find it quite surprising, as well

You should not be surprised. This is the dark web. If backups are made, they can be subpoenaed.

I can't trust someone to make backups and store them safely, I probably would not I trust him host my server.

You are missing the point. His customers are looking for someone they can trust to NOT make backups.

Anyway, good luck to Daniel and his customers. As long as we have overreaching governments grasping for power, we need the anonymity and secrecy of the dark web. Hopefully someday their activities can be done openly.

Re:No backups?!

[bob4u2c]

Just contact the CIA, I'm sure they have a few backups.

Re:No backups?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Who would be dumb enough to back up the content of thousands of kiddy porn sites?

Re:No backups?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or being gay. Or as a woman being in public without a hijab. Or smoking pot. Or all the illegal activities by all sorts of governments, sanctioned or not, in other countries that they don't want others to know about. Perhaps if the governments weren't going around doing horrible things to people your argument would hold up. As it stands, there has to be some force to try to counterbalance the excesses and abuses of government.

Re:No backups?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the government has no business knowing if children are being sold for child porn, or women (mainly women) are being sold into forced prostitution, or if murders are being set up.

Considering governments are guilty of doing all of those things and more, I don't see the point of them knowing. They won't stop themselves or others from doing those things, which is about the only business one would expect the government to perform, so what difference does it make?

If the government that has been caught with indisputable evidence of selling people into slavery, murder, breaking the very laws they set for themselves, and peddling in and production of child porn - what do you honestly expect them to do about other people doing those things?
If they won't stop it, exactly what is the point?

But now that your strawman has been taken down, what about all the other non-crimes that governments kidnap, rape, torture, and murder innocent people over?

What about *rescuing* victims of slavery, forced prostitution, and the children being exploited that if done in the open invites a death sentence?

I'm sure people would love to see children or women being raped in the open.

As my last statement shows, you clearly are against saving people from kidnap, rape, slavery, and murder. Why do you want those people to endure such awfulness? Why don't you want to help them, and condemn their rescuers to death?

Re:No backups?!

[ShanghaiBill]

Because the government has no business knowing if children are being sold for child porn

Pedophilia is a medical condition as well as a crime. By over-criminalizing it, we push it into the shadows, make it harder to treat and increase the number of victims. In Japan, pedophiles can buy childlike sex dolls. There is strong evidence that these dolls provide a satisfactory outlet for many pedophiles, and reduces their desire to prey on real children. These dolls are illegal in America, and can only be ordered on the dark web. Do you think that makes sense?

... or if murders are being set up.

Most of the murders arranged on the dark web are between drug gangs. This is a direct result of their activities being illegal, and thus very profitable but with no access to legal processes of dispute resolution.

Alcohol prohibition in the 1920s also led to plenty of murders. The solution was fewer restrictions on what citizens could do, not more.

I'm sure people would love to see children or women being raped in the open.

Because that is what always happens when governments reduce censorship?

Reductio ad absurdum

Re:No backups?!

[Luckyo]

Dark Web hosting is by definition of the kind you don't want any backups of. This is about securing backups against a government entity with court backup. Not against "random hackers".

And it's much harder to secure backups against such entity, requiring a completely different approach. You're thinking securing against hackers. That's a completely different game compared to one they're playing.

Re:No backups?!

[_merlin]

Same's true in Australia in theory, but enforcement is lax. There are various ways to side-step inspections or make them ineffective anyway. If you've got contacts in the police force, you can get advance notice of when an inspection is going to happen and temporarily move your sex workers who are on the wrong kind of visa off the premises. The ones who actually have permission to work in Australia but aren't being paid properly or are being forced to work excessive hours can be coerced into giving convenient answers if interviewed using various carrot/stick approaches.

Enforcement is pretty lax in Europe as well. It's an open secret that organised criminal groups move women from Eastern Europe and Russia through the German FKK clubs and the Amsterdam glass houses. Probably a lot of corruption and lack of will to take enforcement seriously.

Now we know ...

[PPH]

... where Bobby Tables went to work after graduating.

Dark web host

[PPH]

Big Red Button next to the front door. 'In the event of a search warrant, press"

The dark web

[fredrated]

went dark. Oh the irony.

Hacker Unkown

[AlexanKulbashian]

Let me guess, hacker router his connection through the dark web? :D

Web servers at home?

[DogDude]

Why do so few people set up web servers at home? It ain't rocket science. It can be done on *any* computer. Really. Unless you're hosting something really huge or something that gets a huge amount of traffic, just fire up any old PC, install a web server, and you're done. Do your own backups (drag and drop folders, if you're too clueless to schedule something). People used to do it all of the time, back when setting up things like web and FTP servers were more complicated than it is now. It's100% free, and if you're doing something sketchy, you've got 100% control of your own files and your own backups.

Re:Web servers at home?

[Woldscum]

Most ISPs require a business class contract to have a server. Here that is a min of $350/mo for 50/5.

Re:Web servers at home?

[phantomfive]

It's100% free, and if you're doing something sketchy, you've got 100% control of your own files and your own backups.

People with technical knowledge who are doing sketchy things like to host their stuff on other people's home servers, often on their router (which has firmware that hasn't been updated in years).