Talking to the Hacker Who Took Down a Fifth of the Dark Web

On Friday, a hacker took down a huge chunk of the dark web. Visitors to over 10,000 Tor hidden services running on Freedom Hosting II—a hosting provider for dark web sites—were greeted with a perhaps surprising message, The Verge reported.

"Hello, Freedom Hosting II, you have been hacked," the message read. According to a report from independent security researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis, Freedom Hosting II ran around 20 percent of all dark web sites.

A screenshot of the message left by the hacker on Freedom Hosting II sites. Image: Screenshot by the author

On Saturday, the hacker claiming responsibility told me in more detail how and why they took down the service.

"This is in fact my first hack ever," they said in an email sent from the same address posted to the hacked Freedom Hosting II sites. "I just had the right idea."

The hacker said they first compromised the service on January 30, but only had read access; meaning they couldn't change or delete files, but just see what sites were hosted.

"Initially I didn't want to take down FH2, just look through it," the hacker said. But they then allegedly found several large child pornography sites which were using more than Freedom Hosting II's stated allowance. Usually, Freedom Hosting II has a quota of 256MB per site, but these illegal sites comprised of gigabytes of material, the hacker claimed.

"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. At the time of writing, the hacker claims to have found 10 child pornography sites with approximately 30GB of files.

Read the rest at Motherboard.