Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is known for going all out for capturing cyber criminals has taken a new step in hacking operation. According to court documents the agency used a single warrant and compromised more than 8,000 computers in 120 different countries against child pornography site.
However according to a latest report the magnitude of this hacking operation was larger than what was being speculated. What happened was that the FBI collected more than 8,000 IP addresses to hack computers that were located in 120 different countries. The shocking thing is that all computers were attacked using a single warrant.
Basically, the case was about the investigations conducted by the FBI in relation to dark web’s child pornography website Playpen. It is apparent that this is by far the largest known hacking campaign by a law enforcement agency and it also demonstrates how the policing crime may affect dark web in the future.
However the agency seized Playpen site in February 2015 but did not shut it down. Instead they started running this website from a government server for around 13 days. Though the agency had administrative control of Playpen but even then the investigators couldn’t see the original IP addresses of visitors of Playpen as users connected to this site through Tor network.
To break this shield of anonymity, the agency deployed NIT (network investigative technique). The technique involves using malware to hack computers. This particular malware included an exploit for Tor browser and with its help the agency was able to hack into the computers of all the visitors of Playpen’s child pornography threads. The malware sent the real IP addresses of the suspects to FBI.