Anonymous shuts down hidden child abuse hub
Tor paedos torpedoed, names outed
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Members of hacktivist collective Anonymous are claiming credit for shutting down a deep underground child abuse site and outing its membership list.
Account details of 1,589 members of Lolita City were posted as part of Anonymous’ Operation Darknet, a wider effort aimed against abuse of the Tor network by paedophiles. Lolita City, said to be hosted by Freedom Hosting, alone housed more than 100GB of child pornography, according to a statement by Anonymous.
As well as providing anonymisation, the Tor network supports a private “dark” top-level domain, .onion. Sites on the "hidden" domain were only visible to Tor users or through Tor gateways, such as tor2web.org. Although some services, such as anything that uses UDP, are blocked, .onion sites are by no means immune to hacking - as the attack by Anonymous illustrates.
Anonymous members discovered links to child abuse images in a section called Hard Candy on a .onion site called The Hidden Wiki. Anonymous removed the links, which were reposted by a site administrator. After noticing that "95 per cent of the child pornography listed on the Hidden Wiki shared a digital fingerprint with the shared hosting server at Freedom Hosting", the hacktivists issued a series of ultimatums, which were ignored.
Anonymous then began a series of denial-of-service attacks aimed at Freedom Hosting, and most particularly Lolita City. The user database of the site was extracted using a SQL injection attack, ars technica reports.
The Tor network is widely used by human rights activists and often used as a means to get around government-applied censorship controls, such as the Great Firewall of China. The service is also used to exchange pirated content or by paedophiles.
Tor activist Jacob Applebaum welcomed Anonymous' action: "Anonymous pwned a bunch of pedos; huzzah," he said via his ioerror Twitter account.
Security experts were more cautious: Sophos, for example, argues against such vigilante actions. "Their intentions may have been good, but take-downs of illegal websites and sharing networks should be done by the authorities, not internet vigilantes," writes Graham Cluley of Sophos.
"When 'amateurs' attack there is always the risk that they are compromising an existing investigation, preventing the police from gathering the necessary evidence they require for a successful prosecution, or making it difficult to argue that evidence has not been corrupted by hackers." ®
COMMENTS
take-downs of illegal websites and sharing networks should be done by the authorities, not internet vigilantes
lets face it the police and authorities are so inept at taking down sites, by the time they have been through all the legal wranglings the site operators are on to them and move house!
That's not what's happened
What we have here is a collection of people who claim to support free speech imposing thier own views and effectively acting as a censor. In other words, hypocrites.
I couldn't agree more with this kind of content being removed. I can't support the idea that it's the job of hackers to police this though, this is the first step down a bad, bad road. Anarchy.
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