A popular web server called Daniels Hosting has been hacked by unknown assailants and over 6,500 pages on the dark web have been deleted.
Daniel Winzen is the Administrator of the server, which hosted sites that contained: cryptocurrency services, pornography, hacked files, and online marketplace services. All of these websites were accessed using a special browser called Tor. Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. And it is used to access sites with a .onion suffix. People often use these websites for illegal activities because they are really hard to regulate and monitor, so its very useful that Tor services obscure and hide your identity.
As of yet, Winzen hasn’t found the vulnerability, but he believes its a PHP exploit which gave the hackers access. PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor (no, the acronym doesn’t follow the name). It is an open source, server-side, scripting language used for the development of web applications. He should get the server back up and running some time in December, with a few changes to “bad designs” he implemented in the past.
No one is sure why the attack happened, or who did it, but the Anonymous hacking collective have been behind takedowns of other dark web hosts in the past, but so far there is no sign of that group’s involvement in this attack.
