Daniel’s Hosting (DH), the largest dark web service provider, has once again been hacked. This time, around 7600 different websites went down following the incident.
Dark Web Hosting Provider Hacked
Reportedly, the largest web free hosting provider Daniel’s Hosting (DH) was hacked again. This is the second hacking attack on this service after a little more than a year.
According to ZDNet, Daniel Winzen, the German software developer behind the service has disclosed the attack. His message appeared on the message portal of the now-defunct DH, which revealed that the incident took place on March 10, 2020. The attackers behind the attack, upon accessing the DH backend, not only took over but also deleted all databases related to hosting.
Besides, the attackers also deleted Winzen’s account and created a new one. Though, despite affecting the DH backend, the attack did not affect any accounts of users hosting sites on the platform. Yet, Winzen recommends updating their account passwords owing to the potential exposure of passwords.
7600 Sites Down, And Will Remain Down
Following the incident, around 7600 websites hosted on the platform went offline.
Moreover, Winzen hints that the sites may perhaps remain offline in the future too. While he’s planning to investigate the cause behind the incident, he won’t be doing so immediately.
As per his statement to ZDNet,
I am currently very busy with my day-to-day life and other projects, I decided to not spend too much time investigating. This is a free-time project I do next to my full-time job, and it’s very time consuming to try and keep the server clean from illegal and scammy sites.
However, he also expressed his interest in relaunching the service later with improvements.
I’m still planning on relaunching the service at a later time with new features and improvements. Not having to administrate the services all the time will hopefully give me more time for actual development. However, it may take months before I’m ready to relaunch.
Until then, he advises the users interesting in dark web hosting services to switch to other platforms.
This is the second attack on DH after more than a year. Earlier, the service faced a similar attack in November 2018, as a result of which, 6500 websites going offline.