Anonymous Hacker Pulls Plug on Thousands of Dark Net Sites

Twenty percent of the Dark Net was taken offline last week, when a hacker compromised a server hosting some 10,000 websites on the Tor network.

Tor, designed to hide the identities of its users, is widely used on the Dark Web, which isn't indexed by mainstream search engines and serves as a hub for illegal online activities.

Visitors to the affected pages were greeted with the message, "Hello, Freedom Hosting II, you've been hacked." Freedom Hosting II is the server that hosted the Tor pages.

The attacker, who has claimed to be part of the hacker collective Anonymous, reportedly took Freedom Hosting II offline because 50 percent of its sites contained child pornography.

The original Freedom Hosting sites hosted as much as 50 percent of the Dark Web's pages as of 2013, when it was taken down by law enforcement. A number of child porn prosecutions followed that action.

Rudimentary Hack

This incident supposedly was the first hack carried out by the attacker, who claimed responsibility in an interview with Motherboard. In addition to taking Freedom II offline, the person stole 74 gigabytes in files and a 2.3-GB database.

The database stolen from Freedom II contains 381,000 email addresses -- thousands of them with .gov extensions, Troy Hunt, who runs the Have I Been Pwned website, told Wired.

However, those .gov addresses may not be legitimate, he noted.

The hack of Freedom II was relatively rudimentary, said Tim Condello, technical account manager and security researcher at RedOwl.

"They identified a configuration issue and used it to identify the root user of the system and gain control of it that way," he told TechNewsWorld. After gaining control of the system, "they overwrote the index file and redirected the landing page for all the websites to a landing page containing their message."

Shared Vulnerabilities

This attack demonstrates that when it comes to resistance to vulnerabilities, the Dark Web doesn't have an edge.

"The underlying technology of the Dark Web isn't anything revolutionary. The way a content management system or a hosting service operates is identical to how it's done on the open Web," Condello said.

"The difference is how the content is communicated, so it's accessible only through the Dark Web," he continued.

"The code that's used for a forum on the Dark Web is the same code that's used on the clear Web," Condello explained, "so if there's a vulnerability identified for WordPress, that vulnerability can be exploited on a Dark Web website using WordPress just as it would on the open Web."

Flaws in Dark Web

The attack on Freedom II also shows the danger of concentrating resources in a central location.

"The fact that so many sites used this single particular hosting provider meant that a breach of that provider meant a breach of thousands of sites," noted Danny Rogers, CEO of Terbium Labs.

"The anonymity of the Dark Web relies on its distributed nature," he told TechNewsWorld. "These sorts of centralizations create significant weaknesses."

Although breaking into servers and stealing data on the open Web is illegal, it remains to be seen what the consequences may be for the hacker of Freedom II.

"I'm sure they angered a lot of people, but I'm not sure how much anyone can do about it," Rogers said.

There may be legal ramifications from the attack, but they could be for the people identified in the dump of stolen data rather than for the hacker.

"The data release is going to be a major boon to law enforcement," Rogers observed.

More Attacks to Come

Attacks on the Dark Web are commonplace, but they don't often get the visibility of the assault on Freedom II.

"These attacks will continue on a pace with what we see on the clear Web," Condello maintained.

"I think the new pattern is going to be that as vulnerabilities are revealed on the open Web, people are going to go to the Dark Web and see if there are any sites with those same vulnerabilities," he suggested. "Getting access to sites built around anonymity and pulling the curtain back on that can give you power and money."

Use talk not tech to tame your children's online habits

The complaints have got louder over the past few months as I have tried to manage how much time two of them (teenage children) spend online and to restrict what they see.

A patchwork of different technologies help me do this. It includes:

• rules on the router to limit net time
• apps on tablets to watch content
• software on PCs to spot malware and filter searches

It works, after a fashion, but I know it has holes and that is why I also use a lot of sneakernet.

This involves me walking around the house, kicking my kids off the game console, tablet, phone or TV (delete as appropriate) they are using when they should be doing homework, cleaning out the rabbit or getting ready for school.

Locked off

Research suggests I'm not alone in using tech to oversee online time - both to limit it and to help them stay safe.

About 44% of parents use apps to oversee online activity, 39% check browser histories and 37% put controls on the router, suggests statistics gathered by security company Symantec.

I use all three of those and want to use more. And it looked like technology was going to get even more useful as electronics companies released products with comprehensive parental controls onboard.

It's perhaps no surprise that parents are keen to turn to technology to help manage time online, says Nick Shaw, European general manager at security company Norton, because it's one area where they struggle to find help.

"When people have a parenting problem with their children, they might go to their own parents for advice," he says, "but this is the one area where your parents are not as clued up as you are."

And, he says, children are even more clued up and easily capable of running rings around their parents.

"A lot of parents are very naive about this," he says.

Even I got complacent because none of the tech I had put in place was sending me alerts. I thought it was all working fine and my children were browsing and gaming in an impenetrable bubble of safety.

Wrong.

Slowly I found out that by fiddling with system clocks, using safe mode and putting home PCs into sleep states, my two teenagers could avoid most of the locks and blocks.

My schoolboy error, says Mr Shaw, was to let the hardware do the heavy lifting.

"Technology is going to help you," he says, "but it's not going to get away from the fact that you should be having more conversations about this with your kids".

What I should be doing, he says, is helping them to understand why the controls are needed.

Explaining the reasons, he says, can help to defuse some of the objections.

It is fair to say that my children and I have had some of these conversations. But they have been more of the "play-less-games-and-do-more-maths" type rather than the "anti-virus-stops-your-YouTube-account-being-stolen" sort.

Rights and respect

Tony Anscombe, security evangelist at anti-virus company Avast, says talking to children about safe ways to use the web is better than just imposing restrictions.

"Sure," he says, "set some rules about how they should use it, but you should also educate your kids about basic security principles.

"A lot of parents just do not have the conversation, talking to them about what is acceptable and what is not."

This should cover not sharing passwords and thinking before they share personal data such as contact information, images and videos.

Naivety puts many children at risk, he says, and it is worth reminding them about what can be done with that information and who might want it.

It might not just fall into the hands of cyber-thieves, he says, it might also expose them to cyber-bullying or just be inappropriate to share.

Warnings about the hidden features in popular apps are worth passing on, he says, as they often seek to scoop up more information than they really need.

"The biggest and most important thing that parents can do is run the apps their children do," he says.

This will help parents understand what information children might share and uncover any hidden features the apps possess.

Some, he says, look innocuous but are designed to help children conceal what they are doing.

"Gadgets are only half the story, if that," says Dr Sonia Livingstone, from the London School of Economics, who studies how children use the internet, as part of her work with the long-running EU Kids Online project.

Companies should concentrate on doing less selling and more on designing services that do not need the protections they peddle, she says.

In addition, she says, parents should encourage children to do the right thing by doing it themselves, rather than just by dictating terms.

It's about respect too, she says, helping children make good decisions instead of arbitrarily imposing rules.

Tomorrow's Cities - the future of a good night out

It's 18:00, and our day in the smart city is almost over.

The evening rush hour is generally considered to be even worse than the morning one so forget that - it's time to head for a night out.

Let's begin with an app. If you are in London, Paris, New York or Berlin you could make use of CityMapper, which draws on public data to plot the best route between A and B, even offering a rain-safe route.

And there are no shortage of information apps to make sure that you get the best out of your city - from specific city-based ones such as I love Beijing, which offers insights into the best places to go in the city, to Spotted by a Local, which offers tips on the best or cheapest restaurants.

And if you have a specific interest, there are apps for that too, such as Guerrilla Queer, which arranges meet-ups for the LGBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) community in Boston and New York away from the traditional gay bars.

If you are fed up with the traditional night out at the cinema, virtual reality technology is offering you a chance to feel like you are actually inside a movie.

The Void (vision of infinite dimensions) wants to take VR headsets to public spaces and create theme parks around them.

Its first foray is a "Ghostbusters experience" at Madame Tussauds on Times Square, New York.

Visitors enter a series of Ghostbuster-inspired spaces, including a musty old hallway and a lift shaft, surrounded by digital apparitions.

They wear a VR headset, a chest plate that provides haptic feedback and a backpack with a computer in it.

Each virtual object in the space has a real-world counterpart, and visitors take part with up to three others, who appear as avatars next to them.

Since it opened in July, it has had 17,000 visitors who, apart from complaining about long queues, have given largely positive feedback.

It was, said Void spokeswoman Whitney Thomas, one of the first examples of "hyper-reality" entertainment.

The company had been hoping to start work on a VR theme-park in Salt Lake City in October, but the land earmarked for the project is yet to be built on.

If the Pokemon Go craze taught us anything, it was that the digital and real worlds are going to be increasingly blended together in future entertainment, and there is no better playground than a city.

Increasingly, people can take part in urban games such as Parkman Murders, a smartphone app available in Boston that tells the story of a Victorian murder in the city and invites listeners to take part in the story via a series of location-based experiences.

And last year, visitors to London's financial district could join an interactive theatre piece, Adventure 1, which invited the audience to download MP3s with instructions on how to track a trader (played by an actor) around the City of London.

Increasingly our smartphones are becoming an important social tool, helping us make decisions about where we eat, drink and meet.

Technology can play a huge role in bringing people together, but ironically there is a huge disconnect between our increasingly tech-driven cities and its citizens.

What do you know about your city, for example? Can you see any concrete examples in it of how city-instigated technology is improving your life?

If the answer to this is no, then you are not alone.

According to a recent survey conducted by the Institution of Engineering and Technology, only 18% of people had heard of a smart city, 8% thought it referred to a city with a higher than average proportion of universities and colleges, while 5% thought it was a city with a strict cleaning regime.

Much of that is down to the fact that technology for city authorities is often related to efficiency and making infrastructure and other systems work better.

"Waste management tends not to be high on people's agenda," is how Tom Saunders, author of innovation charity Nesta's report Rethinking Smart Cities from the Ground Up, puts it.

Cities are trying to engage citizens more - offering apps that allow them to report issues such as uncollected rubbish, potholes or abandoned cars.

They are also hosting hackathons for tech-savvy citizens to come up with innovative people-centric tech solutions to a variety of issues.

But for the foreseeable future, the tech agenda of cities and that of citizens is likely to remain poles apart.