A hacker group affiliated with the notorious Anonymous, has breached the servers of Freedom Hosting II, a popular underground web host that is said to contain about one-fifth of the dark web.
The hacker group has shut down 10,613 dark web websites, and posted their web pages with a message that said: "Hello, Freedom Hosting II, you have been hacked." The hackers have also copied the hosting service's database, which they have since released publicly.
According to the service Have I Been Pwned?, the data dump includes the email details of nearly 381,000 users, saying that 21 percent of those email details were available in previous breaches registered on its service.
What this means, many of those emails were actually people's actual day-to-day email addresses.
New sensitive breach: Freedom Hosting II had 381k email addresses exposed. 21% were already in @haveibeenpwned https://t.co/LGaAnj1hUA
— Have I been pwned? (@haveibeenpwned) February 5, 2017
Troy Hunt that runs the Have I Been Pwned? service, said that there were "thousands" of .gov email addresses, although "how many are real and what purposes they were being used for is another issue."
The database dump also contains many dark web's website backups. According to Hunt, many of the data is "highly explicit."
Because Freedom Hosting II was popular hosting service for dark web websites, almost half of the sites caught the dump contains illicit sexual content involving children. Other websites include a diverse collection of fraudulent investment operations, carding and counterfeiting sites, hacking forums, personal blogs, and bitcoin services.
