Anonymous takes down darknet child porn site on Tor network
Pedophiles connecting to a concealed child pornography site got an unwelcome surprise last week, courtesy of the hacktivist group Anonymous. Lolita City, a child pornography site run on over a concealed “darknet,” has been taken down by Anonymous members, and account details of 1,589 users from the site’s database were posted as evidence.
The takedown is part of Anonymous’ Operation Darknet, an anti-child-pornography effort aimed at thwarting child pornographers operating on on the Tor network. Anonymous’ attack was focused on a hosting service called Freedom Hosting, which the group claims was the largest host of child pornography on Tor’s anonymized network. “By taking down Freedom Hosting, we are eliminating 40+ child pornography websites,” Anonymous claimed in its statement. “Among these is Lolita City, one of the largest child pornography websites to date, containing more than 100GB of child pornography.”
Based on a secure networking technology originally developed by the US Navy, Tor routes traffic through a collection of volunteer servers scattered across the Internet, making monitoring of what is being viewed or where communications are coming from difficult. The Tor network also hosts a private “dark” top-level domain, .onion (which is not an official TLD), via its Hidden Service Protocol; these sites are visible only to Tor users or those using a Tor gateway such as tor2web.org.
