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Anonymous' Hacking Group Takes Down 40 Child Porn Sites, 'Darknet,' Exposes Over 1500 Users

Anonymous' Hacking Group Takes Down 40 Child Porn Sites, 'Darknet,' Exposes Over 1500 Users

The self-proclaimed "hacktivist," group "Anonymous," has taken down a new target -- and this time the group's action has gained some warm, or at least positive reaction from the public. Users of the pedophile "Freedom Hosting" server had been hiding within the "dark net" corners of cyberspace. The child-porn sites were allegedly run on scattered volunteer servers, making content monitoring extremely difficult.  But then, out of the blue, Anonymous announced that it had successfully accomplished its goal of revealing the account details of 1,589 users of the explicit database, and disabled over 40 child pornography websites. ARS Technica on the news:

"The takedown is part of Anonymous’ Operation Darknet, an anti-child-pornography effort aimed at thwarting child pornographers operating on the Tor network. Anonymous’ attack was focused on a hosting service called Freedom Hosting, which the group claims was the largest host of child pornography on Tor’s anonymized network. 'By taking down Freedom Hosting, we are eliminating 40+ child pornography websites,' Anonymous claimed in its statement. 'Among these is Lolita City, one of the largest child pornography websites to date, containing more than 100GB of child pornography'.”

ZDNet writes that the hacking collective had warned Freedom Hosting to remove all of its disgusting links on October 14. Freedom Hosting ignored and Anonymous attacked, knocking the server offline and out for the count by the evening of the October 15.

“We have been targeting them in secret for a while now, taking down their servers as much as possible,” one hacker named Arson told Gawker in regards to "Lolita City." “We decided to seek media attention for this operation so that we may get the resources needed to shut them down on a more permanent basis.”

Anonymous attacked Westboro Baptist Church in February, when one hacker hacked the group's website while being interviewed live on the radio with a WBC spokesman.

The group is known for its more obstructive hacks of PayPal and MasterCard, as well as the San Francisco BART system. Does this news change your opinion of Anonymous, or, hackers in general?

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