Uneasy Goes the Dark Web

I think we have all asked ourselves why the Dark Web is able to run the kinds of child porn operations that it does.  We might even remember that the Dark Web sells tools that allow other hackers to get into bank credentials, lock up computers with ransomware, and read other people's mail.  These kinds of operations have been around for a long time, even before the Internet, but have thrived in the last 10 years.  In today's Wall Street Journal there is a hint that something may be afoot there that makes the users of the Dark Web pause.

It apparently affected Freedom Hosting II, where some private conversations were posted on-line - not the kind of thing its users would like.  The article says this about the extent of the attacks:  "Friday’s attack knocked about a fifth of the Dark Web offline, according to Sarah Jamie Lewis, a former security engineer for Amazon.com Inc. who is now an independent researcher and operates the privacy-focused website Mascherari.press. Soon afterward, the attackers published a series of databases containing large amounts of information available on Freedom Hosting II, which was the largest hosting provider for anonymous websites, she said.". 


I checked around for some news about this and found articles on several sites, including Hacker News and Motherboard. The latter claims to have interviewed the person who caused the outage and says it was his first hack ever.  After getting inside, he saw child porn which encouraged him to bring down the sites.  This is a nice story.  Hacker News says it was Anonymous, though they suggest that it could be linked to NSA or the FBI, since it went to a host for Science Applications in Virginia.  Between the various stories there are all the usual suspects for this kind of thing.  Nobody blamed the Russians, yet.    

Perhaps it is not important which agency or individual did the hack.  The Dark Web has more or less operated with impunity for many years now, though disrupting Silk Road for a brief time did give users of that complex some reasons to think about it.  The users and Web hosts that sell child porn get complacent about abusing children, so it is hard to be sympathetic to their losses in this case.  What we see is the same kind of thing that the hacks of the DNC brought out.  Exposure has more of an effect than hacking the sites and finding out who uses them.  That alone will give the users of these sites something to think about.