One of the most incredible moves in the history of Internet has just been made by Anonymous, since the hacktivist group managed to take down 20 percent of the portals existing in the Dark Web, given the fact that more than 50 percent of these sites were filled with child pornography. In addition to this content, the portals included .onion URLs hosting botnets, weird fetish portals, sites peddling hacked data and fraud websites.
Anonymous Stole The Information Of Thousands Of Child Porn Users
To do this, Anonymous first managed to break into the servers of Freedom Hosting II, which is known for being one of the largest hosting services in the Dark Web, and for the fact that it can be accessed through Tor browser. Once Anonymous entered, the hacktivist group hacked and stole the database of 10,613 sites, in which is included the email details of over 380,000 users.
After that, Anonymous wrote a defacement message on all sites, so anyone who entered could see it. This message stated that the portal was hacked and that in addition to having zero tolerance for child pornography, the hacktivist group copied all the files and dumped the entire database on another site hosted on the Tor network. According to what the group specified on its message, the database was 2.3GB while the files were 74GB.
Anonymous Initially Tried To Blackmail Freedom Hosting II
However, the first message that Anonymous wrote on the portals was that if anyone wanted to recover the stolen information, it had to pay .01 Bitcoin -$200- . Nevertheless, even when the hacktivist group actually received two payments in Bitcoin wallets, they eventually decided to dump the data publicly.
Apparently, the person who made the major hack on these Dark Web sites said that this was actually his first operation of this kind and that he never intended to take down all of the hosting provider customer sites. In fact, he explained that the only thing that made him take this decision was the amount of child pornography that can be easily found on these portals, which is something that Anonymous has always fought against.
