The Dark Web is now 20 percent lighter — thanks to a “Mr. Robot”-like vigilante hacker who has zapped one-fifth of its content in a crusade against child porn.
“Action had to be taken,” the unnamed hacker told the blog Motherboard.com, adding that he or she is a complete novice.
“This is in fact my first hack ever,” the purported hacker claimed.
The weekend hack attack crashed Freedom Hosting II, the largest single host of dark web sites.
The hack breached Freedom Hosting II’s servers, taking it offline and stealing thousands of GB in data, according to numerous tech publications.
The breach was first reported in theverge.com, which credited the group Anonymous. But Anonymous has since tweeted that it is not involved in this one.
“Initially I didn’t want to take down FH2, just look through it,” the “hacker” told Motherboard.
But then the hacker found 10 large child porn sites on the servers — large enough to suggest that the sites were paying FH2 for hosting.
The hacker is promising to turn the offending material over to law enforcement.
Meanwhile, visitors to more than 10,000 FH2-hosted sites are instead getting a message: “Hello, Freedom Hosting II, you have been hacked.
In addition to the purported porn sites, FH2 hosted a number of bitcoin escrow services, Ponzi schemes and hacking forums, dark web researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis told theverge.com.
“This is a major blow considering many were personal or political blogs and forums,” Lewis told The Verge.
FH2 has a despicable history of hosting child pornography, including what federal law enforcement has described as porn involving infants and torture.
In 2011, Anonymous targeted the web hosting service in an anti-child porn attack “Operation Darknet–” an attack that resulted in the member-list leak of more than 1,500 child-porn site subscribers.
The feds raided FH2 in 2013 for the same thing in a case that remains unresolved.
US authorities are still fighting in an Irish court to extradite then-FH2 owner Eric Eoin Marques, 30, from Ireland on child porn distribution and conspiracy charges.
The FBI calls Marques the world’s “largest facilitator of child porn.”
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