10 ms·

An Anonymous group has taken down a major dark web hosting service

71 points by Spydar007 10y ago

godmodus 10y ago
Fills me with 1990 nostalgia of IRC being ddosed and no one being able to trade ccs or dcc them 0daywarez. Ah the sweet chaos and drama. Fun times, glad to see people are still having fun :0) The part about childporn though... That's pretty abhorrent. Nearly half. I just don't understand child porn. Why? I wonder if there are child porn "Hunters" that go after these scum. (by Hunters I mean White hats)
- neotek 10y ago
  This very hack was undertaken by those "hunters" you're asking about. There was also Operation Darknet, an Anonymous-driven takedown of Lolita City (one of the worst child porn onion sites) and the original Freedom Hosting, back in 2011. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/operation-darknet http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/operation-darknet
  - zamalek 10y ago
    I often disagree with Anon due to their disregard of consequences. In rare circumstances they really shine.
    - herbst 10y ago
      To be fair most anons disagreed with this heavily because de-anonymizing people for whatever reason is the most non anonymous thing to do.
- johnnycarcin 10y ago
  I mentioned this awhile back when a similar topic came up. Awhile back I wrote a small crawler/search engine for onion sites that didn't log visitor info, just the search terms. After about a week if running I went back to see what people were searching for and the majority of it was child porn. I was totally shocked. I had anticipated cracking and warez type stuff but not child porn, or at least not at the levels I was seeing. I shut down the app after that :(
  - mynewtb 10y ago
    Maybe it was 50% law enforcement and 49% journalists?
    - hackermailman 10y ago
      I always assume when some vandal/vigilante takes down a service is that they're just interfering with an investigation to actually catch these criminals instead of scattering them to new unknown services. Reminds me when Assad, early in the Syrian war was using an insecure private email server to dictate all actions of the military and police, which some idiots discovered so decided to spam it with threats and he shut it down. Meanwhile the opposition (before they became foreign terrorists) had also broken into the server and were able to counter the military and police actions against them until they lost this golden intelligence source from the idiotic actions of vigilantes purporting to be on their side.
      - ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
        > Reminds me when Assad, early in the Syrian war How persuasive is your example depends on which side the reader takes in this war. (I don't take either)
        hackermailman 10y ago
        You can be pro-Syrian government and still see from that example how naive vigilantism can screw your cause more than it does your enemies. A different example would be some terrorist run Telegram channel full of Assad moles who lost their intel access because pro-Assad vigilantes successfully managed to guess a password and showed up to spam shutting the channel down. I'd bet on this Tor host being an active sting operation considering the fate of the previous one, FreedomHosting.
        celticninja 10y ago
        The point made is valid regardless.
  - 10y ago
- TACIXAT 10y ago
  That's a really dangerous game to play. In order to shut it down you have to seek out the sites that host it. Unless you have the protection of working for law enforcement, it's not worth the risk. Even if you do work for law enforcement, the psychological damage from seeing those acts can be very high.
- lightedman 10y ago
  Plenty of CP hunters. I'm hunting it right now on the Candid App, not like you need to hunt it there since it seems to get blatantly advertised by all the idiots. Funnily enough, I've told the CEO several times and she doesn't seem to care that it's happening, as many of these groups on Candid are still operational, and she's dead silent on the issue.
  - microcolonel 10y ago
    Bindu Reddy seems to be overwhelmed with the balance between half of the core product being effectively censorship, while the other half is about countering self censorship. Tough company to run. And even to set up a machine learning model to prevent CP sharing, they would need to find a jurisdiction where it's legal to store the training data.
- ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
  > child porn "Hunters" You make it sound like they are hunting for porn. Child porn producer, child porn distributor, rapist and pedophile are all different things.
- microcolonel 10y ago
  Because of the specific way that child porn is, you are basically admitting to breaking the law by reporting it. If you want to go after child abusers then you have to do it anonymously. And of course, in the U.S. you can't even use synthetic images to lure child abusers, because they can count as child porn in some cases. The system discourages everyone from the public to law enforcement from doing anything productive about child sexual abuse.
  - ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
    > The system discourages everyone from the public to law enforcement from doing anything productive about child sexual abuse. Using "synthetic images" (lolicon?) to lure "child abusers" (even before you have evidence of them doing crime) and conducting vigilante justice is surely going to be productive if you don't weight in false positives. Do you think the means of current drug war in Philippines is justified by its goals? Want to extend this practice to CP?
    - microcolonel 10y ago
      That's quite an extrapolation. Murder is illegal, just because you're investigating something doesn't mean you are entitled to decide or enforce the law. That is what courts are for. By synthetic images, I mean believable CG images of the illegal acts in question. I'm under the impression that paedophilic criminals are careful only to associate with people who are also committing the same crime. If you could gain the trust of traffickers and offender parents(parents are sometimes (often?) involved) through reasonable proof, then I imagine you could stop a lot more child sexual abuse and trafficking.
  - ZoFreX 10y ago
    > The system discourages everyone from the public to law enforcement from doing anything productive about child sexual abuse. It does? Last I heard, law enforcement shut down this stuff regularly, and even have teams dedicated to it.
    - microcolonel 10y ago
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  >I wonder if there are child porn "Hunters" that go after these scum If you are looking to build a skillset these are the only acceptable targets in my opinion.
  - ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
    Just go play some wargames and CTFs. Attacking systems intended by their developers to be attacked is perfectly acceptable. Attacking other people systems just because you think it is accepted by society without at least getting warrant from a judge is not.
    - cmdrfred 10y ago
      I'm not concerned about society to be honest. You hurt children, I hurt you. I refuse to compromise on that.
      - ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
        > You hurt children You are already mistaken, I don't. Already mentioned, just repeating: http://www.euronews.com/2016/10/21/does-killing-drug-dealers-work http://www.euronews.com/2016/10/21/does-killing-drug-dealers... What if it is not children, but "just" drug addicts. Do you believe you are free to harm drug dealers?
        kakarot 10y ago
        Lol he wasn't saying you hurt kids, look at the context
        ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
        It was intended to be a joke about false positives. Thought to put ":)" in the end but decided to keep HN emoticon-free. Jokes aside, I think vigilante justice always ends up being a witch-hunt dealing harm to lots of innocent people.
- api 10y ago
  Today's stock markets with all the hedge fund bots remind me of 90s IRC. It grew up. Instead of #warez it's Nasdaq.
falcolas 10y ago
So, using their numbers, over 5,000 legitimate tor sites are being held hostage. That's not justice (vigilante or otherwise), that's just greed.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  Not hosting child pornography doesn't mean legitimate :)
  - throwaway2016a 10y ago
    It doesn't mean illegitimate either. For example, sites to reach people in places where there is state sponsored censorship. Sure it's not legitimate as far as the country do the censorship is concerned but people/governments outside that country it may be considered defensible. Security researchers (white hat and pen testers) often have onion sites to provide some street cred. If you want to blog but want to stay anonymous for personal reasons. Although with several of those I see no reason not to use a legitimate web host or VPS providers.
    - dogma1138 10y ago
      No but you can bet your money on that at least half of those sites are trading sites of one sort or another trading in illegal goods and services. As for blogs out of 150 researchers/security professionals I know including myself no one is running an onion site for street cred if it's not anonymized there is no point having an onion address is not the same as running a hidden service.
      - throwaway2016a 10y ago
        > As for blogs out of 150 researchers/security professionals I know including myself no one is running an onion site for street cred if it's not anonymized there is no point having an onion address is not the same as running a hidden service. I may know one or two but yeah, it's a stretch. I was trying too hard to think of examples.
mkj 10y ago
If a sufficient number of tor nodes decide that a particular onion site is undesirable, could it become filtered and basically unreachable?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jlgaddis 10y ago
  I hope not. One of the use cases for Tor is bypassing exactly that type of censorship.
  - ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
    Hidden service will operate as long as at least one introduction point is not censoring. The concept of semi-static nodes (guard nodes, introduction nodes etc.) is what makes Tor secure against voluntary deployment of black lists and many probabilistic attacks. [1] https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en
  - ZoFreX 10y ago
    It is not "censorship" if people decide they don't want to give you free bandwidth.
    - ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
      What we are talking about is a "sufficient number of tor nodes" blocking access to a service for everyone. If a majority can block some content by vote, it is a censorship.
ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
> I had anticipated cracking and warez type stuff but not child porn Your analysis is heavily biased by censorship, including self-censorship present in our society [1]. Cracking and warez type stuff is way more acceptable than CP. You can tell your friends you found some warez site that you like, but you can't tell your friends you found some CP site that you like. Ban something else from the normal web and see it driven into the dark web. Just ban, for example, religion, and you will see everyone using your search engine to find religious literature on a much larger scale. Btw it is non-consensual porn production which is harmful, not distribution. Distribution is a victimless crime that everyone stands up against due to copyright propaganda [2]. If it was a product of society becoming conscious, we will see everyone setting up neighborhood watch and other "grassroots" measures to prevent actual crime. In reality nobody gives a fuck until he watches the news and then the only thing they do is vote to setup CP, then porn, then warez censorship. After that it turns political censorship but nobody speaks up anymore. Just watch what happens in the UK. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html [2] https://torrentfreak.com/the-copyright-lobby-absolutely-loves-child-pornography-110709/ https://torrentfreak.com/the-copyright-lobby-absolutely-love...
- rekord 10y ago
  You're being naive at best here. The state CP today is essentially pay for tourture using bitcoin and tor. If there's anything that's going to ruin the Internet it's not understanding that not everyone wants this nihilistic future forced on them.
  - ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
    > The state CP today is essentially pay for tourture using bitcoin and tor. This is actually the first time I hear about things like that. Any reference?
    - leesalminen 10y ago
      Is it not obvious to you that a 7 year old having sex with a 50 year old is torturous for the child?
MikeTLive 10y ago
reading these comments has me convinced that more than one commenter is a consumer of child porn.
- ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
  Probably you are talking about HN comments, not the source comments. I am presenting unpopular opinion here (score for my comment [0] goes wildly from -4 to +4) and you probably believe I am doing it because I am consumer. What actually make me questioning current state of laws is this simple experiment: can you run an FTP site (or Syncthing folder, or automated seedbox) at home where everyone on the Internet is free to upload and download anything and leave it unattended? What kind of laws prevent you from doing it? The only laws are pretty much the copyright laws and CP distribution laws. As for copyright you at least have an option to setup DMCA abuse address, but you still have to actually process requests. As for CP laws things are worse: you will get your house raided without a warning. These things damage net neutrality and make content distribution the privilege of companies which manage to make responsibility non-personal and keep the damage taken from data center raids under control. There are enough people questioning copyright and at least we begin to understand that copyright is not some sort of "natural law", but a protectionist policy. Discussions on CP are pretty much taboo in our society. People mess up terms (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567776) and believe witch-hunt is justified (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13568255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13568255). My point is that ban on CP distribution is, like copyright, is not the result of distribution being a crime by itself (even in current state it is a "victimless crime"). It should be made clear that it is only justified as long as it harms producers (https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=13567612 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=13567612). If it does not, then the law should be abolished, similarly to how we had to abolish marijuana possession and distribution laws. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567284
- ue_ 10y ago
  Refusing to defend what one regards as an odious law is not the same as consuming the material yourself. I am also against such laws, yet I do not consume the content myself. Please do not misrepresent or mischaracterise people in order to dismiss their point, it is used to silence debate (such as by calling people 'perverts' because the watch porn to discredit them). If you have an argument, post it - but please do not silence debate. I'm sorry if it wasn't your intention to do this, but it's a recurring theme to call people certain words or names in order to silence them nowadays.

71 points by Spydar007 10y ago

Fills me with 1990 nostalgia of IRC being ddosed and no one being able to trade ccs or dcc them 0daywarez. Ah the sweet chaos and drama. Fun times, glad to see people are still having fun :0) The part about childporn though... That's pretty abhorrent. Nearly half. I just don't understand child porn. Why? I wonder if there are child porn "Hunters" that go after these scum. (by Hunters I mean White hats)

neotek 10y ago
This very hack was undertaken by those "hunters" you're asking about. There was also Operation Darknet, an Anonymous-driven takedown of Lolita City (one of the worst child porn onion sites) and the original Freedom Hosting, back in 2011. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/operation-darknet http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/operation-darknet
- zamalek 10y ago
  I often disagree with Anon due to their disregard of consequences. In rare circumstances they really shine.
  - herbst 10y ago
    To be fair most anons disagreed with this heavily because de-anonymizing people for whatever reason is the most non anonymous thing to do.
johnnycarcin 10y ago
I mentioned this awhile back when a similar topic came up. Awhile back I wrote a small crawler/search engine for onion sites that didn't log visitor info, just the search terms. After about a week if running I went back to see what people were searching for and the majority of it was child porn. I was totally shocked. I had anticipated cracking and warez type stuff but not child porn, or at least not at the levels I was seeing. I shut down the app after that :(
- mynewtb 10y ago
  Maybe it was 50% law enforcement and 49% journalists?
  - hackermailman 10y ago
    I always assume when some vandal/vigilante takes down a service is that they're just interfering with an investigation to actually catch these criminals instead of scattering them to new unknown services. Reminds me when Assad, early in the Syrian war was using an insecure private email server to dictate all actions of the military and police, which some idiots discovered so decided to spam it with threats and he shut it down. Meanwhile the opposition (before they became foreign terrorists) had also broken into the server and were able to counter the military and police actions against them until they lost this golden intelligence source from the idiotic actions of vigilantes purporting to be on their side.
    - ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
      > Reminds me when Assad, early in the Syrian war How persuasive is your example depends on which side the reader takes in this war. (I don't take either)
      - hackermailman 10y ago
        You can be pro-Syrian government and still see from that example how naive vigilantism can screw your cause more than it does your enemies. A different example would be some terrorist run Telegram channel full of Assad moles who lost their intel access because pro-Assad vigilantes successfully managed to guess a password and showed up to spam shutting the channel down. I'd bet on this Tor host being an active sting operation considering the fate of the previous one, FreedomHosting.
      - celticninja 10y ago
        The point made is valid regardless.
- 10y ago
TACIXAT 10y ago
That's a really dangerous game to play. In order to shut it down you have to seek out the sites that host it. Unless you have the protection of working for law enforcement, it's not worth the risk. Even if you do work for law enforcement, the psychological damage from seeing those acts can be very high.
lightedman 10y ago
Plenty of CP hunters. I'm hunting it right now on the Candid App, not like you need to hunt it there since it seems to get blatantly advertised by all the idiots. Funnily enough, I've told the CEO several times and she doesn't seem to care that it's happening, as many of these groups on Candid are still operational, and she's dead silent on the issue.
- microcolonel 10y ago
  Bindu Reddy seems to be overwhelmed with the balance between half of the core product being effectively censorship, while the other half is about countering self censorship. Tough company to run. And even to set up a machine learning model to prevent CP sharing, they would need to find a jurisdiction where it's legal to store the training data.
ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
> child porn "Hunters" You make it sound like they are hunting for porn. Child porn producer, child porn distributor, rapist and pedophile are all different things.
microcolonel 10y ago
Because of the specific way that child porn is, you are basically admitting to breaking the law by reporting it. If you want to go after child abusers then you have to do it anonymously. And of course, in the U.S. you can't even use synthetic images to lure child abusers, because they can count as child porn in some cases. The system discourages everyone from the public to law enforcement from doing anything productive about child sexual abuse.
- ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
  > The system discourages everyone from the public to law enforcement from doing anything productive about child sexual abuse. Using "synthetic images" (lolicon?) to lure "child abusers" (even before you have evidence of them doing crime) and conducting vigilante justice is surely going to be productive if you don't weight in false positives. Do you think the means of current drug war in Philippines is justified by its goals? Want to extend this practice to CP?
  - microcolonel 10y ago
    That's quite an extrapolation. Murder is illegal, just because you're investigating something doesn't mean you are entitled to decide or enforce the law. That is what courts are for. By synthetic images, I mean believable CG images of the illegal acts in question. I'm under the impression that paedophilic criminals are careful only to associate with people who are also committing the same crime. If you could gain the trust of traffickers and offender parents(parents are sometimes (often?) involved) through reasonable proof, then I imagine you could stop a lot more child sexual abuse and trafficking.
- ZoFreX 10y ago
  > The system discourages everyone from the public to law enforcement from doing anything productive about child sexual abuse. It does? Last I heard, law enforcement shut down this stuff regularly, and even have teams dedicated to it.
  - microcolonel 10y ago
cmdrfred 10y ago
>I wonder if there are child porn "Hunters" that go after these scum If you are looking to build a skillset these are the only acceptable targets in my opinion.
- ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
  Just go play some wargames and CTFs. Attacking systems intended by their developers to be attacked is perfectly acceptable. Attacking other people systems just because you think it is accepted by society without at least getting warrant from a judge is not.
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    I'm not concerned about society to be honest. You hurt children, I hurt you. I refuse to compromise on that.
    - ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
      > You hurt children You are already mistaken, I don't. Already mentioned, just repeating: http://www.euronews.com/2016/10/21/does-killing-drug-dealers-work http://www.euronews.com/2016/10/21/does-killing-drug-dealers... What if it is not children, but "just" drug addicts. Do you believe you are free to harm drug dealers?
      - kakarot 10y ago
        Lol he wasn't saying you hurt kids, look at the context
        ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
        It was intended to be a joke about false positives. Thought to put ":)" in the end but decided to keep HN emoticon-free. Jokes aside, I think vigilante justice always ends up being a witch-hunt dealing harm to lots of innocent people.
api 10y ago
Today's stock markets with all the hedge fund bots remind me of 90s IRC. It grew up. Instead of #warez it's Nasdaq.

falcolas 10y ago

So, using their numbers, over 5,000 legitimate tor sites are being held hostage. That's not justice (vigilante or otherwise), that's just greed.

dogma1138 10y ago
Not hosting child pornography doesn't mean legitimate :)
- throwaway2016a 10y ago
  It doesn't mean illegitimate either. For example, sites to reach people in places where there is state sponsored censorship. Sure it's not legitimate as far as the country do the censorship is concerned but people/governments outside that country it may be considered defensible. Security researchers (white hat and pen testers) often have onion sites to provide some street cred. If you want to blog but want to stay anonymous for personal reasons. Although with several of those I see no reason not to use a legitimate web host or VPS providers.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    No but you can bet your money on that at least half of those sites are trading sites of one sort or another trading in illegal goods and services. As for blogs out of 150 researchers/security professionals I know including myself no one is running an onion site for street cred if it's not anonymized there is no point having an onion address is not the same as running a hidden service.
    - throwaway2016a 10y ago
      > As for blogs out of 150 researchers/security professionals I know including myself no one is running an onion site for street cred if it's not anonymized there is no point having an onion address is not the same as running a hidden service. I may know one or two but yeah, it's a stretch. I was trying too hard to think of examples.

mkj 10y ago

If a sufficient number of tor nodes decide that a particular onion site is undesirable, could it become filtered and basically unreachable?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jlgaddis 10y ago
I hope not. One of the use cases for Tor is bypassing exactly that type of censorship.
- ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
  Hidden service will operate as long as at least one introduction point is not censoring. The concept of semi-static nodes (guard nodes, introduction nodes etc.) is what makes Tor secure against voluntary deployment of black lists and many probabilistic attacks. [1] https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en
- ZoFreX 10y ago
  It is not "censorship" if people decide they don't want to give you free bandwidth.
  - ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
    What we are talking about is a "sufficient number of tor nodes" blocking access to a service for everyone. If a majority can block some content by vote, it is a censorship.

ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago

> I had anticipated cracking and warez type stuff but not child porn Your analysis is heavily biased by censorship, including self-censorship present in our society [1]. Cracking and warez type stuff is way more acceptable than CP. You can tell your friends you found some warez site that you like, but you can't tell your friends you found some CP site that you like. Ban something else from the normal web and see it driven into the dark web. Just ban, for example, religion, and you will see everyone using your search engine to find religious literature on a much larger scale. Btw it is non-consensual porn production which is harmful, not distribution. Distribution is a victimless crime that everyone stands up against due to copyright propaganda [2]. If it was a product of society becoming conscious, we will see everyone setting up neighborhood watch and other "grassroots" measures to prevent actual crime. In reality nobody gives a fuck until he watches the news and then the only thing they do is vote to setup CP, then porn, then warez censorship. After that it turns political censorship but nobody speaks up anymore. Just watch what happens in the UK. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html [2] https://torrentfreak.com/the-copyright-lobby-absolutely-loves-child-pornography-110709/ https://torrentfreak.com/the-copyright-lobby-absolutely-love...

rekord 10y ago
You're being naive at best here. The state CP today is essentially pay for tourture using bitcoin and tor. If there's anything that's going to ruin the Internet it's not understanding that not everyone wants this nihilistic future forced on them.
- ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
  > The state CP today is essentially pay for tourture using bitcoin and tor. This is actually the first time I hear about things like that. Any reference?
  - leesalminen 10y ago
    Is it not obvious to you that a 7 year old having sex with a 50 year old is torturous for the child?

MikeTLive 10y ago

reading these comments has me convinced that more than one commenter is a consumer of child porn.

ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
Probably you are talking about HN comments, not the source comments. I am presenting unpopular opinion here (score for my comment [0] goes wildly from -4 to +4) and you probably believe I am doing it because I am consumer. What actually make me questioning current state of laws is this simple experiment: can you run an FTP site (or Syncthing folder, or automated seedbox) at home where everyone on the Internet is free to upload and download anything and leave it unattended? What kind of laws prevent you from doing it? The only laws are pretty much the copyright laws and CP distribution laws. As for copyright you at least have an option to setup DMCA abuse address, but you still have to actually process requests. As for CP laws things are worse: you will get your house raided without a warning. These things damage net neutrality and make content distribution the privilege of companies which manage to make responsibility non-personal and keep the damage taken from data center raids under control. There are enough people questioning copyright and at least we begin to understand that copyright is not some sort of "natural law", but a protectionist policy. Discussions on CP are pretty much taboo in our society. People mess up terms (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567776) and believe witch-hunt is justified (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13568255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13568255). My point is that ban on CP distribution is, like copyright, is not the result of distribution being a crime by itself (even in current state it is a "victimless crime"). It should be made clear that it is only justified as long as it harms producers (https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=13567612 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=13567612). If it does not, then the law should be abolished, similarly to how we had to abolish marijuana possession and distribution laws. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567284
ue_ 10y ago
Refusing to defend what one regards as an odious law is not the same as consuming the material yourself. I am also against such laws, yet I do not consume the content myself. Please do not misrepresent or mischaracterise people in order to dismiss their point, it is used to silence debate (such as by calling people 'perverts' because the watch porn to discredit them). If you have an argument, post it - but please do not silence debate. I'm sorry if it wasn't your intention to do this, but it's a recurring theme to call people certain words or names in order to silence them nowadays.