Anonymous Brings Down Pedophile Hub on the Darknet

[Ichingcarpenter]

It is well known among law enforcement and the tech community that pedophiles congegrate on the darknet, we know they are there but getting them is hard. Law enforcement task force Argo has made progress but now there is a new hunter in the deepweb.

Lolita City, a child pornography site run on over a concealed “darknet,” was taken down by Anonymous, and account details of 1,589 users from the site’s database were released earlier today as part of Anonymous’ Operation Darknet, an anti-child-pornography effort aimed at thwarting child pornographers operating on on the Tor network.

Anonymous’ attack was focused on a hosting service called Freedom Hosting, which the group claims was the largest host of child pornography on Tor’s anonymized network. “By taking down Freedom Hosting, we are eliminating 40+ child pornography websites,” Anonymous claimed in its statement. “Among these is Lolita City, one of the largest child pornography websites to date, containing more than 100GB of child pornography.”


Based on a secure networking technology originally developed by the US Navy, Tor routes traffic through a collection of volunteer servers scattered across the Internet, making monitoring of what is being viewed or where communications are coming from difficult. The Tor network also hosts a private “dark” top-level domain, .onion (which is not an official TLD), via its Hidden Service Protocol; these sites are visible only to Tor users or those using a Tor gateway such as tor2web.org.

Read more at AGnews: Anonymous Brings Down Pedophile Hub on the Darknet http://anongalactic.com/?p=3000



Most do not know this but the darknet is 5 times as big as
the internet you normally play with.

[Ilsa]

1. I'm pleased with Anonymous.

They've been able to get things done. Righteous dudes (or dudettes).

I read about the darknet in Discover magazine, IIRC. I knew it was 5+ times larger, with the really creepy stuff, like assassins for hire, illegal porn, etc. It's been featured on a few TV shows including House of Cards.

[snagglepuss]

2. Kudos Anonymous

[msrizzo]

3. Good

I hope they take down many more of these.

[davidpdx]

4. I've read about the darknet and always wondered about the stuff out there

But then I read about things like this make and it makes me wonder if it would be worth the risk.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

7. The way it's painted, it's basically all criminal activity.

So I'm not sure what the attraction of using it would be.

Besides, as we learned thanks to Snowden and others, people who use TOR and similar services are automatically flagged and targeted by the NSA for higher levels of surveillance, so it doesn't even seem like that good of an idea even if you're just some paranoid trying to avoid the government.

[davidpdx]

8. I don't doubt most of it is illegal activity

I also think someone who doesn't know what they are doing (like me) might be more likely to get hacked out on the dark net. I'd be more worried about that then the government.

If I was going to take a look, I surely wouldn't do it on my computer.

[Facility Inspector]

10. Of course they will paint it as criminal activity

anything they can't control is often considered "criminal."

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

11. Well, then what else is on the darkweb?

I haven't heard about anything but criminals and paranoids. What else is out there?

[Facility Inspector]

23. I started

to work through the process to run tor from a USB or whatever the process is, but I lost interest.

I do know that anything police or government can't control is often painted as "criminal."

Comes with living in a soft police state.

It's always been this way.

[Chan790]

31. This way of talking about the dark web is somewhat misleading...

the term refers to any page on the internet that is "dark" (that is invisible or unaccessible to search engines for any reason).

Yes, it includes things like The Silk Road and kiddie-porn sites running on .onion domains which require a Tor browser to access. It's also includes any page without any links from any other accessible webpage. (Personally, I have a sandbox parked on a server that I use to test code...it doesn't link to any other page and it isn't linked from any other page so the only way to access it is to know its web-address...thus, it's technically part of the dark web. It would be about as interesting to you as watching paint dry unless you were really really interested in my JQuery homework from the online course I'm taking) It also includes anything behind a password or running encrypted or under a SSL: yours, mine and everybody's webmail accounts; your online banking; e-commerce sites. That specifically is why the dark web is so large...it's every single limited-access or controlled-access page on the web. The reason it's 5-times bigger is because it's basically everything Google Page-Rank (and Bing! and ... etc.) doesn't see...and that's a lot of stuff it has no reason to see and a little bit of stuff that Google has made page-rank intentionally not see.

It's the latter that gets all the attention but it's barely a shade in the corner of the dark-web. Most of the dark web is benign and uninteresting. Some of it is not benign in the wrong hands. (Such as your online banking.) Very little of it is malign.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

43. Very informative post.

This site takes it a bit further: http://www.brightplanet.com/2014/03/clearing-confusion-deep-web-vs-dark-web/

[vaberella]

50. Thanks for this. n/t

[geek tragedy]

22. Do you think people go to such lengths

to discuss baking cookies?

[Facility Inspector]

24. they will go to such lengths

to protect privacy.

What do they need privacy for? I'm sure plenty for criminal activity, but it's not all criminal activity.

This is technology the US government/military CREATED.

[PosterChild]

48. And it was created specifically to give a chance . ..

.... to those who are living under oppressive regimes. Under many circumstances that we never have to deal with, privacy can be much more important even for matters that we would consider rather trivial.

[Amimnoch]

41. More criminal than not, but not all criminal, and some is beneficial to society imo.

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Web

I can completely understand a number of other countries, groups, and businesses not wanting US, Chinese, Russian, or other European governments knowing thier business.. legal or not.

Category/Percentage
Gambling/0.4
Guns/1.4
Chat/2.2
New (Not yet indexed)/2.2
Abuse/2.2
Books2.5
Directory/2.5
Blog/2.75
Porn/2.75
Hosting/3.5
Hacking/4.25
Search/4.25
Anonymity/4.5
Forum/4.75
Counterfeit/5.2
Whistleblower/5.2
Wiki/5.2
Mail/5.7
Bitcoin/6.2
Fraud/9
Market/9
Drugs/15.4

[vaberella]

49. Really...shoot. I've used Tor for years...but that was when I downloaded music.

I don't do that any more...no need it on youtube.

[Facility Inspector]

9. I remember when the plain old internet

seemed like a "darknet" way back in the mid 90s.

There was lots of weird shit on the internets back then.

[SidDithers]

32. The data is suspect...nt

Sid

[Doctor_J]

33. This is the first I've heard of it, and I've been on the internet since day one

I don't know what to think of it.

[malaise]

36. Never heard of it either n/t

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

5. A) Good for Anonymous

B) I wonder how many politicians are in that nearly 1600 users
and

C) I always wonder at that stat that the darknet is 5 times bigger. After all, it's taking the world's combined businesses, social media, personal, organization, education, and governmental sites to make up the non-darkweb. How the heck can there be so much 'hidden' stuff? You'd think it would be the other way around, and if every criminal out there was surfing the darkweb all day, they'd still only be something like 5% as big as the rest of the web.

[Ford_Prefect]

13. The point is the portion of internet "we" use is a very small fraction of the whole.

Darknet, allegedly 5 times larger in comparison, is also only a fraction of the whole.

The part "we" use daily for email, information and entertainment is a superficial layer of an enormously deep and complex system. Think of it as the skin on an apple.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

14. Of what, though?

The internet is information. We pass it around, we view or read or listen to it. How on earth is there 5 times as much that only a small number of people have and are using? I don't even see how it's logistically possible, unless 90% of the darkweb is essentially coated in cobwebs, viewed once or twice then forgotten, but kept on file 'just in case'.

[Chan790]

38. I explained this above.

the term dark-net doesn't mean "hard to see"...it means "intentionally invisible to search-engines".

Go. Log-on to your online banking. Google will never see that page because it's encrypted and behind a password and even if it could see it, Google has hard-coded its page-rank to not index it as they don't want people searching for the account-transfer page of Erich Bloodaxe's checking account. It's part of the dark web. So is your webmail, my webmail, the pages and scripts that handle e-commerce for online retailers and probably 1000 other pages you see each and every week.

A very small portion of the deep-web (the pages that make the topical surface-web pages run) are dark-web. A very small portion of the dark web is actually malign. Those tend to be on .onion domains only accessible from Tor browsers or require very sophisticated back-doors to enter.

You're almost certainly simultaneously on the surface web, deep web, and dark web right now.

[OneGrassRoot]

6. So far, their choice of targets is admirable. Yep, kudos to them! n/t

[Stevepol]

12. Is this the same Anonymous

that thwarted Rove's effort to steal the election in OH in 2008 (or was it 2012?)?

If so, I'm glad to see that they're still alive and kicking.

At present with the vote in our elections being counted by unverifiable (either legally or practically speaking) electronic voting machines, it's good to know that there is at least one group that is dedicated to stopping the theft and rigging.

Maybe this is the only practical way of achieving something like fair vote counting. The politicians are completely indifferent to whether the vote is counted fairly or not, that is, those politicians that are not outright opposed to any verification at all.

[Ford_Prefect]

16. Most politicians are terribly naive about technology and assume hacking the vote is too difficult.

Unfortunately the opposite is true. It is far too easy to do it. Much of the electronic system was designed to be that way by the vendors. Some have suggested the federal laws passed requiring electronic voting systems and devices were a case of political engineering to create such a system. I tend to agree given who drove that law into existence and the degree of independent oversight absent from the law, voting machine design, implementation and operation.

[Wilms]

19. Among the messed up parts is that HAVA didn't "require" electronic voting.

It merely offered a bunch of money to states for that purpose. It did require "accessible" voting. For some reason, that point was lost.

[Helen Borg]

15. Oh, great! I hope they release the actual names of the people!

And that law enforcement will get them. Being on that site is illegal to begin with.

[tanyev]

17. "Freedom Hosting", huh?

I wonder if that's run by a right-wing uber patriot.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

18. Dumb question: what is a darknet?

I'm starting to think that the word "internets" may be correct, and may be creepy, or may be a good thing.

Darknet sounds like something Batman would use. Or the Joker.

[Travis_0004]

20. Where did you hear that the dark web is 5 times as big?

I don't buy that for a second. I would be suprised if its 1% as big as the surface web.

Just so we don't confuse terms, there is the Deep Web (can not be indexed by standard search engines), and the dark web (requires tor or other means to reach)

The Deep web is 400 times larger than the regular internet. 99% of this stuff is legit. Your email account (since without a login google can not index it). Anything beyond the login screen at Netflix. I log into my company and access the server of the interenet when i work from home. People use the deep web every single day, and don't know it.

The Dark Web, 99% of people on this site have probably never used. An address would end in .onion
Believe it or not, even on the dark web, a lot of the stuff is legal, but a very high percent is not. I would be amazed if it was even close to 1% the size of the surface web.

[cwydro]

25. I've never even HEARD of this darknet.

I had no idea this even existed.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

27. That makes a lot more sense to me.

Sounds like a lot of folks are just conflating the two.

Any idea what sort of legal stuff winds up on the dark web?

[Travis_0004]

35. There are some book clubs and other stuff

There is a large book club, what of the more popular books is 1984 by george Orwell. Technically this book is still under copyright, although you can read any of his books at George-Orwell.org. Some of the books on there are brand new, and breaking some copyright laws, some are well out of copyright.

Also, the US is a very free country, I get on DU and criticize Obama with no fear. In a lot of countries that is not true, and the deep web can be used to host forums where freedom of political speech is allowed. Perhaps not legal in their country, but its nothing we would find to be extreme.

[joshcryer]

42. Stuff that winds up on Cryptome.

99% conspiracy stuff.

[1StrongBlackMan]

21. The thing about the hack is, it will pose an interesting legal is should the government attempt ...

to use the dumped user datat to prosecute any of the 1,589 users. The information was gathered unlawfully (theft) by a non-governmental agency (not covered by the 4th and 5th amendments).

What's a prosecutor to do?

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

26. I'd suggest a parallel

would be finding a body in the trunk of a stolen car.

The police only found the body because someone stole the car, but they'll still probably be able to use that body as evidence in going after someone for murder.

[1StrongBlackMan]

37. Real life case, from my second year out in the BAR ...

A drug dealers home was broken into by a rival dealer. The rival took documents indicating his nemasises stash house locations (who keeps that stuff written down?) ... I suspect he planned to hit the houses later. The rival was picked up for another, unrelated, crime. The rival offered up the documents to encourage a plea deal.

In the end, we did not/could not use the documents to secure search warrants; but, we did use them to set up surveilance.

The problem here is, unlike setting up on a street to watch activity, warrants are required to surveil computer usage. How do you get a judge to sign a warrant when the basis for the warrant is stolen documents ... other than, of course, by lying to the judge.

(Note: This was pre-patriot act days, so I am unsure about the state of the law.)

[Travis_0004]

28. I doubt we will see many prosecutions from this

But on the plus side, hopefully a few people will be too scared to attempt to go back, maybe the site will be down for at least a little while, and hopefully some of the images were deleted from the server, to be lost forever.

I'm sure the site will return. What the FBI needs to do is find out who hacked it, and hire them as consultants (I know the hackers probably wouldn't be lining up to admit it to the FBI. I doubt the US government is that good at finding this data. They did manage to arrest the person who founded silk road (the amazon of drugs), but it was due to bad coding on the website, which revealed the location of the servers in Iceland, and only with physical access to the server they found the IP address to a coffee shop in San Fransisco. I say hire Anonymous, and do it legally, and make a few arrest.

[joshcryer]

40. Yeah, I'm sure if they got incriminating data they would've...

...contacted the authorities. They could use it then for the investigation.

[Mike Nelson]

29. Yay!

...the kids used need to be identified and their homes investigated, though. What a tragedy for the young children...

[merrily]

30. I'm beginning to think I'd rather pay taxes to Anonymous than to the US government.

They seem a hell of a lot more effective and, AFAIK, a hell of a lot more cost-effective.

Would that make me an anarchist, a Libertarian or just a cheap realist?

[Are_grits_groceries]

34. There are many articles about the Darknet.

It is used for privacy but child porn is a major player there along with other illegal activities.
I have no desire to enter that realm. There is enough evil on this side.

If I had the skills to hack, I might try to take down some child porn sites. As it is, no.

[joshcryer]

39. Here's the paste bin:

http://pastebin.com/88Lzs1XR

Doesn't look like they got anything incriminating, just usernames.

Should shut the service down indefinitely though. No one will go back there since they got hacked.

[ToxMarz]

44. "darknet is 5 times as big as the internet you normally play with."

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/HowBigIsTheDarkWeb

That is not correct and alarmist.

...
This, however, appears to be misleading; and may impact on and cause ​FUD for those not generally exposed to Tor and other elements of the dark web.
One of the elements which may cause confusion is the definition of "dark web" vs the definition of "deep web". Unfortunately, some sites (such as ​Wikipedia) don't distinguish between the deep and dark webs.

Definitions

Web: the portion of the Internet which is accessible via a web browser; the World Wide Web.

Deep web: information which is not registered with any search engine (definition as per the August 2001 paper ​The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value from the Journal of Electronic Publishing). This includes information which is housed in databases and which is only viewable through dynamic pages generated when the content is requested, and information which resides behind authentication such as on private organizational networks and public networks such as Facebook.

Dark web: that portion of the web which cannot be easily reached from the public Internet, and usually requires specialized software to access. Examples of the dark web are the Tor network and hidden services, the I2P network and its eepsites, and the RetroShare network.
...

Size

Size depends on exactly how we categorize things. For the purposes of this article we're talking about the web, i.e. the portions of the Internet which are accessible from a web browser; not the entire Internet itself. So from here, bearing in mind that we're discussing the dark web and the deep web:

The deep web is claimed to be approximately 500 times larger than the public Internet, based on figures in the Surfacing Hidden Value report above and on others (e.g. ​About.com), although these others often only reference the paper above.

The dark web, however, is considered to be much smaller. There are likely to be 1-2000 Tor hidden services [ ​freehaven.net, ​donncha.is ], although this is very hard to establish as hidden services are, by design, hidden! There are currently approximately ​3,000,000 Tor users; this provides an upper bound on the number of hidden services, and it is likely that few of these user actually run hidden services.
...

Conclusion

The dark web is not really all that large. Important, but not "vast reaches of the Internet", and certainly not as large as the deep web...

[MynameisBlarney]

45. Awesome!

Keep up the good work!

[TransitJohn]

46. So the article you posted has been removed, and that site looks smarmy

Check this out
https://anongalactic.com/15-year-old-destroys-third-wave-feminism-in-2-paragraphs/

Edit: the site also carries anti-Black Lives Matter material. And the story in the OP is 4 years old.

[vaberella]

52. Dude you did your research. I noted this too...

https://anongalactic.com/the-blacklivesmatter-movement-is-entirely-wrong/

Disgusted.

[Ikonoklast]

47. Looks like lots of Libertarians will be getting a visit from the authorities.

The love the "freedom" to view child pornography and consider it their right to do so.

[smirkymonkey]

51. Nice going Anonymous!

[zappaman]

53. Just saw a new doc about the dark web

Check it out.
Very good.

http://www.deepwebthemovie.com

[benld74]

54. Congrats Anonymous any chance the GB's of trash were deleted as well???

[haikugal]

55. Great work Anonymous!! Thank You!!! n/t