The Dark Web is now having a tough weekend since the hacker group affiliated with Anonymous managed to break into servers of Freedom Hosting II to take down over 10,000 websites in Dark Web.
All the visitors of these websites hosted by Freedom Hosting II service gets a chilling greeting message. “Hello, Freedom Hosting II, you have been hacked.”
The Freedom Hosting II is one of the largest hosting services for the underground websites. They hold some 15 to 20 percent of all the websites on the Dark Web, as per the estimates of researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis. All of these websites are .onion and they can, therefore, be accessed using the Tor browser.
The Hackers stole a database of the Freedom Hosting II and defaced all the websites hosted and then demanded a ransom if they want their data back. Some of the stolen data is already dumped on another site that is hosted on Tor network. The researcher behind the Have I Been Pwned tweeted. This collection of data includes the mail details of more than 380,000 users.
The main reason for Anonymous to target this hosting service and all of its website is that they do not have any tolerance to child pornography. They explain in a message posted on these hacked sites. “Moreover you host many scam sites, some of which are evidently run by yourself to cover hosting expenses,” they add.
The notice mentions that all files have been copied and the database has been dumped, amassing to 74GB of files and 2.3GB of the database. “Up to January 31st you were hosting 10,613 sites. Private keys are included in the dump,” the message reads.
Anonymous hackers mention that over half of the files hosted on Freedom Hosting II servers were related to child pornography, which is, obviously illegal. It has become a common occurrence for dark web sites to host such vile content, something that law enforcement is aware of and has been trying to combat.