Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Hackers Take Down Thousands of ‘Dark Web’ Sites, Post Private Data

Someone claiming to be affiliated with Anonymous compromised a private web hosting service last week, taking down more than 10,000 sites on the highly encrypted "dark web," security researchers said.

The hacker or hackers broke into the hidden web hosting service Freedom Hosting II, claiming to have harvested all of the sites' files and its database, totaling almost 80 gigabytes of material, they said in a message appearing on the screens of users trying to access the sites.

They said more than half of the information they obtained was child pornography, even though the service promotes itself as having a "zero tolerance policy" to such material.

Other materials in the exposed data include numerous references to botnets — automated computer networks used to launch distributed denial of service (or DDoS) attacks, spew out spam or steal data — email addresses, usernames and passwords from dark web sites. 

Click here for the full article. 

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