Thousands of Tor-based websites went belly up last week after a hacker decided to take them down for vile behaviour. The hacker posted a message on over 10,000 Tor hidden services running on Freedom Hosting II saying: "Hello, Freedom Hosting II, you have been hacked."
It doesn't get clearer than that. But the message continued to justify the reason for hacking and provided download links for all dumped private keys and system files, except the user data. The hacker noted that half the data stored on the hosting company's servers was child pornography.
"We are disappointed. This is an excerpt from your front page 'We have a zero tolerance policy to child pornography,' – but what we found while searching through your server is more than 50% child porn," the message read, The Verge reported.
Speaking to the Motherboard, the vigilante hacker said he did not want to take down the websites, which amounted to 20 percent of all dark web sites, initially, but changed his mind after he discovered disturbing amount of child porn sites running on Freedom Hosting II.
Freedom Hosting II has a quota of 256MB per site, but the illegal sites had gigabytes worth of data. "This suggests they paid for hosting and the admin knew of those sites. That's when I decided to take it down instead," the hacker said.
The hacker also revealed that the massive attack on the dark web sites was carried out in 21 simple steps, which included creating a new site, changing some settings in a configuration file, triggering a password reset for a target, turning on root access and logging back in with new system privileges. The last step given out by the hacker was "enjoy."
After dumping most of the data online, the hacker said a copy of child pornography detail will be given to a security researcher, who can hand it over to law enforcement.
"This is a major blow considering many were personal or political blogs and forums," dark web researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis told The Verge. "In the short term, a lot of diversity has disappeared from the dark web."
