Anonymous Takes On Child Pornographers

Hack collective Anonymous has turned its attention to child pornography, claiming to have brought down a webhost alleged to be hosting more than forty sites on which the illegal content was offered. According to the loosely-affiliated group's statement, Freedom Hosting was challenged by evidence of the pornography stored on its servers but refused to delete it; Anonymous then "infiltrated the shared hosting server of Freedom Hosting and shutdown services to all clients."

The company then allegedly restored its servers from backups, at which point Anonymous reiterated its warnings and hacked the host for a second time. "Freedom Hosting has been declared #OpDarknet Enemy Number One" the group now says, referring to its online crusade, and subsequently shared personal information on almost 1,600 individuals said to have been users of the sites.

"By taking down Freedom Hosting, we are eliminating 40+ child pornography websites, among these is Lolita City, one of the largest child pornography websites to date containing more than 100GB of child pornography" Anonymous

Freedom Hosting is a .onion host, reachable through the Tor network using a proxy server that provides some degree of anonymity for users. Such networks are known as "darknets" because of their clandestine nature. Anonymous now says it will crash "any other server we find to contain, promote, or support child pornography."

[via GMA News]