Eric Eoin Marques, 28—the “largest facilitator of child porn on the planet,” according to the FBI—was recently arrested and is currently in an Irish jail awaiting the conclusion of his extradition trial. The FBI aims to bring Marques to trial in the United States. If convicted, Marques faces up to 30 years in prison. Although the anonymous nature of Tor makes confirming identities difficult, all signs point to Marques being one of the most important men on the Dark Net: He’s allegedly the founder of Freedom Hosting, Tor’s most popular hosting service since it was created in 2008. Freedom Hosting maintains servers for some of Tor’s most infamous websites, including TorMail, long considered the most secure anonymous email operation online; major hacking and fraud forums such as HackBB; large money laundering operations; the Hidden Wiki, which, until recently, was the de facto encyclopedia of the Dark Net; and virtually all of the most popular child pornography websites on the planet, the charge that has landed Marques in custody. Famous child pornography websites such as Lolita City, the Love Zone, and PedoEmpire were customers of Freedom Hosting. While Marques’s Dark Net identity has not yet been confirmed by authorities, the FBI’s description of "largest facilitator of child porn on the planet” applies to the founder of Freedom Hosting more than anyone. An Eric Marques runs an Irish hosting company called Host Ultra Limited, according to a SoloCheck.ie company report. He also owns an account on the webhostingtalk.com forum, where he made 785 posts, first discovered by gray hat hacker SHG.Nackt. On that forum, Marques promoted his business and solicited advice about anonymizing tools such as Virtual private networks. “The charges [against Marques] relate to images on a large number of websites described as being extremely violent, graphic and depicting the rape and torture of pre-pubescent children,” reported The Independent. Every Freedom Hosting website went down simultaneously at around 6:40am ET on Saturday morning, about the same time news of Marques’s arrest hit the Internet. If and when the websites have returned since the downtime, many have been infected with Javascript exploits that may be able to identify visitors by grabbing a user’s cookies, logins, and IP address to send “home”—which, in this case, is the Verizon-owned IP address 65.222.202.53. The previously unknown exploit only affects Firefox version 17, which is exactly the version Tor uses. MORE http://www.dailydot.com/news/eric-marques-tor-freedom-hosting-child-porn-arrest/
More of the story: Freedom Hosting first gained mainstream attention in 2011 when Anonymous attempted to shut down the service and the child pornography websites it hosted using Distributed Denial of Service attacks in an offensive called Operation Darknet. The story was a big public relations win for Anonymous, usually an extremely polarizing entity. "It was the right thing to do. Period," wrote Ars Technica commenter Reflex-croft. "Too bad they can't focus all their efforts on stuff like this, it would be nice to be able to rally behind them unequivocally." "kudos!... this is where you should be doing!" wrote astut945. "shutdown those child porn sites!" The most popular child pornography website attacked, Lolita City, hosted 100 gigabytes of photos and video during the 2011 offensive. The sites involved were disabled. IP logs were releasedand mapped. This proved that the websites were not invulnerable. Anonymous took a victory lap. Anywhere from a few minutes to a little over a day later, the attacks ceased and the war was over. All the sites were restored. By June 2013, Lolita City boasted 14,969 members and growing, 10 times its membership during Operation Darknet. The 100 gigabyte figure was shocking in 2011. By 2013, the website hosted over one million pictures and thousands of videos. The Anonymous offensive had actually provided major publicity for the child pornography sites and their patron, Freedom Hosting. Operation Darknet involved some of Anonymous’s most notable members. Sabu (Hector Xavier Monsegur), the Bronx-based hacker, LulzSec founder and FBI informant was one of the principal organizers of Operation Darknet, leading many to wonder to what extent the FBI had knowledge of those Dark Net raids. Sabu became an FBI informant in August 2011 after pleading guilty to a dozen criminal counts, reportedthe New York Times. Operation Darknet was executed in October 2011. #opDarkNet will be releasing logs of actual pedophiles utilizing Lolita City's services. 190 IPs from actual users of the site. And IP map.— The Real Sabu (@anonymouSabu)November 2, 2011At the very least, the FBI was fully aware of the raids into the Dark Net and allowed them to proceed. The question is, who was directing the operation if Sabu was, at that point, a puppet doing the FBI’s bidding? more at: http://www.dailydot.com/news/eric-marques-tor-freedom-hosting-child-porn-arrest/
Misleading title is misleading. No, just no. Worth noting that the twitlonger link cited by the OP doesn’t mention anything to substantiate this claim, but whatever. Any website, and its server, is a potential target of attack. The usual suspects of social engineering, SQL injection, etc. What the .onion network does is simply mask the IP of any given server – but that in no way makes the site invulnerable to usual hacking attempts. An SQL injection will work just as well on a .onion site as it will on a normal server (assuming the assuming security hole). What appears to have happened is that ONE SERVER (Freedom Hosting) that used the .onion service was cracked, and that same crack would likely have happened even if the server was not using the .onion service. In other words, the exploit in this case affected one server and had nothing to do with the TOR network. TORMail was affected because it was hosted on the same server as Freedom Hosting. What further exasperated the present case was that the compromised server was then infected with dodgy javascript, which again would have occurred had the site not being on .onion. It seems that those who updated Firefox were not affected though. I’m wondering if the present cracking has anything to do with Operation Darknet. This was, primarily, a DDOS attack against the Freedom Hosting server because it hosted child porn, but there was some additional information and IP mapping gathered at the time. It may have helped lay the groundwork for the Feds to crack the server (and would be interesting if information to that effect came to light), but it is hard to say at this point. The golden rules seem to be don’t look a child porn, avoid the Freedom Hosting server and keep you FF up to date.
/r/ mod: plz change TT to Freedom Hosting (CP) Tor server taken down by FBI, admin arrested move to CP SitRoom kthxbai
The following provides evidence that this 'torsploit' can be traced back to the NSA and the private military contracting firm SAIC. https://www.cryptocloud.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2894&p=3852#p3852
Vitalik Buterin | On 04, Aug 2013 Freedom Hosting, a web hosting provider specifically targeting websites in the Tor community, has been shut down, and its owner Eric Eoin Marques arrested in Ireland on charges of facilitating the distribution of online child pornography. Marques is now sitting in jail, denied bail while the Irish courts determine the validity of an extradition request by the United States. Freedom Hosting was responsible for a large number of major “hidden services” on the Tor network, most notably including the email provider Tormail, and some estimates suggest that up to half of all major Tor hidden services relied on it for hosting. However, the site has also long been known as a hotbed of child pornography; in 2011, Operation Darknet, an anti-child-pornography subgroup of Anonymous, sent a warning to Freedom Hosting asking the service to remove all CP-hosting websites. When Freedom Hosting refused, Anonymous launched an all-out attack, hacking into Freedom Hosting’s servers and shutting down all sites two and a half hours later. Now, the US and Irish governments have taken the provider down themselves – but using the much heavier weaponry of the legal system to do the job . When US and Irish law enforcement took over Freedom Hosting’s servers, the sites were not simply taken down immediately. Rather, they let the sites keep operating for some time, and some extra Javascript code was injected into the sites’ webpages, to be automatically run by the browsers of users accessing the sites as part of loading the page. The code in question first checks whether the user is running Firefox 17, and if they are it then opens an iframe which loads an exploit from another site, which then takes advantage of a Firefox 17 vulnerability for purposes the precise details of which are not yet known. At this point, the most common hypothesis is that the exploit makes an HTTP request bypassing the Tor protection, revealing the user’s IP address to the authorities. Fuck yeah!!!! Props to #OpDarkNet. This is a huge win for us, since we had such an issue with freedom hosting during OpPedoChat's infancy. I hope that motherfucker gets what he deserves for not giving a shit about the children who's life's he helped destroy.
On a related note, last week the FBI put up this blurb. (All their you tubes are interesting, with a nice touch of dragnet retro. )
How the hell you do live with the title of the most prolific facilitator of CP on the fucking planet?!
I hope he lives the rest of his days in fear of the retribution he is going to get when the gen pop of whichever prison they send him to learn of the reason why he is in there/
If you're not trolling and serious - I can't wait to see what happens to you, and if possible, I will be there to see it with my own eyes, eyes that will watch the removal of your own.
Well..well..well. It would be a shame if this pedo,,,urum person had their picture all over the interwebs. Yeah pictures hurt, may you rot in hell. Sick o.
Looking at pictures never hurt anyone? What planet are you on? By viewing such disgusting pictures it creates the demand for victims to be abused for your depraved pleasure and leads to yet more serious crimes against innocent victims.
