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The Dark Web is having a rough time right now... although the victims in this case won't earn too much sympathy. An Anonymous-linked hacker speaking to Motherboard brought down about a fifth of the Tor network's 'secret' websites (over 10,000 of them) in a claimed vigilante move. The intruder decided to attack a Dark Web hosting service, Freedom Hosting II, after discovering that it was managing child porn sites it had to be aware of -- they were using gigabytes of data each when the host officially allows no more than 256MB. Each site had its usual pages replaced with a message that not only chastised FH2, but offered a data dump (minus user info) and explained the nature of the hack.
Reportedly, the attack wasn't difficult. The hacker only needed to have control over a site (new or existing) to get started. After that, it was mostly a matter of modifying a configuration file, triggering a password reset and getting root access.
From early indications, the perpetrator is handling the data relatively responsibly. It's going to a security researcher who'll hand it over to law enforcement, which might just use it to bust the porn peddlers.
Source:
https://www.engadget.com/2017/02/05/hack-knocks-out-fifth-of-dark-web/
(Score: 5, Insightful) by choose another one on Tuesday February 07 2017, @10:15PM
Given that half the CP on the dark web is/was reckoned to be run by the FBI (and other law enforcement probably run part of the rest) - see e.g. https://thenextweb.com/security/2016/11/11/the-fbi-likely-ran-nearly-half-the-child-porn-sites-on-the-dark-web-in-2016/ [thenextweb.com] it is very likely that law enforcement would just have to bust themsleves.
This scenario becomes even more likely when you consider that someone had to pay for the data (bandwidth), someone got the host to override bandwidth limits, and someone apparently didn't care about the expense... sure smells like a govt. agency.
If so, oops...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @02:53AM
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An astute observation, and almost certain to be partially true, applying to a number of sites affected. These are important stories to see and to report on, but I wish the submitters would not buy into the witch-hunt lingo like "child porn", which in practice means almost anything, including crude fictional drawings, photos of 17 year olds having consensual sex, and photographic evidence of sexual abuse; that is, what witch hunters call "child porn" is often not what most of us would call porn, and has no children involved.
I would also like to notice the extreme hypocrisy exemplified by the cracker, which is the norm whenever one mounts an attack on free expression. The cracker has undoubtedly downloaded some or all of what xe calls "child porn", thereby committing the same crime (at least in USA) as the alleged website operators. If the cracker wants to claim this is ethically ok because xe did it with the right intentions, we only need to point out that, for all xe knows, the same is true of the people who were sharing the illegal files on the hidden web.
The above analysis, of course, is hair splitting, and mostly irrelevant in the face of facts: the child abuse imagery, fictional or photographic, just as the sexual abuse imagery, just as the murder imagery, just as the mass murder imagery, just as the imagery of an evil nazi using a chainsaw to rape and then dismember a mother and a child have only a tenuous relationship to the acts being depicted. It is very telling that the nazi example would be perfectly legal in USA, as long as no genital contact is shown, but a picture of 2 17 year olds having consensual sex is not. The purpose of every anti-"child porn" law on the books is the same around the world: to prohibit an informed discussion about the child abuse and the sexual abuse, so that the law enforcement has the right of the first night, and every night with people and children it is intended to serve. In the world where we cannot freely share the evidence of abuse, the abuse blooms. The second purpose of any such law, just as important as the first, is to give politicians a reason to censor the public forum. Once the reason exists, the censorship tools are created, and once the tools are created, they are applied to anything else of interest. This works mostly because the misuse of tools is itself censored, which is why the USA law enforcement hates Snowden so much: he peeled off the most important layer, which is required to hide every other crime against the people and their human rights.
Anonymous ~ 0x9932FE2729B1D963
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