It was a difficult weekend for the Dark Web as a group of hackers associated with Anonymous managed to invade the servers of Freedom Hosting II with the aim of conquering 10,000 websites.
Visitors to sites hosted on Freedom Hosting II saw the following message on their screens: “Hello, Freedom Hosting II, you have been hacked.”
Freedom Hosting II is one of the largest underground website hosting services, hosting 15-20% of all websites on the Dark Web according to statistics. It should be noted that all of these websites are .onion and can be accessed via the Tor browser.
Hackers stole Freedom Hosting II's database, defaced the hosted websites, and demanded a ransom for the return of the data.
Anonymous' reason for attacking the hosting service is that they have zero tolerance for child pornography. "In addition, there are fake websites that you obviously run yourself to cover your hosting costs," they added.
Anonymous reports that over half of the files hosted on Freedom Hosting are related to child pornography, which is clearly illegal. It is now common for dark web sites to host obscene content, something the law is trying to combat.
The Anonymous hacker stated that this was his first attack attempt and chose these servers because of the huge amounts of pornography they detected.
The data leak contains emails, usernames, and passwords. So if we hear about arrests in the future against the individuals whose personal data was stolen, it wouldn't be surprising given the use they made of the websites.
