Short Bytes: An alleged Anonymous hacker has taken down about a fifth of the Dark Web. He did so by breaching the servers of popular Dark Web hosting service Freedom Hosting II, which powers about 15-20% .onion sites. The hacker targeted the service as the websites contained a large collection of child porn. The vigilante hacker has also shared a simple 21-step hacking guide.
According to a media report, Freedom Hosting II, the largest dark web site hosting service has been hacked and taken down. The hack was performed by some alleged Anonymous-affiliated hackers. The hackers accessed the servers and stole 1000s of GB worth data.
The hacker, talking to Motherboard, told that the hack was a vigilante move. The visitors to 10,000 .onion websites read an announcement that said: “Hello, Freedom Hosting II, you have been hacked.” As per the estimates of an independent security researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis, the percentage of websites down account for about 15-20% websites on the Dark Web.
Looks like Freedom Hosting II got pwned. They hosted close to 20% of all dark web sites (previous @OnionScan report) https://t.co/JOLXFJQXiH
— Sarah Jamie Lewis (@SarahJamieLewis) February 3, 2017
The hacker has called it his “first hack ever” and he just had the “right idea.” He initially compromised the service on January 30, but only got read access. Back then, he allegedly found heaps of child porn websites that were using more than Freedom Hosting II’s quota of 256MB per site.
The hacker says that he suspected that the website owners paid for the hosting, so, he decide to take down the websites.
The hacker has released the system files dump, but not the data of users. This is because it contained a large amount of child porn. He plans to pass it to some security researcher and law enforcement.
How the hacker took down a fifth of the Dark Web?
The hacker has also shared a simple 21 step process for taking down the Dark Web. The attacker needs to first create a new Freedom Hosting II site, or log into a current one. This needs to be followed by making some configuration changes, triggering password reset, grabbing root access, and so on.
Here’s the screenshot of the alleged method:
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