Hackers erase 6,500 sites from popular web hosting portal

One of the most popular Dark Web hosting services – Daniel’s Hosting – was slaughtered last week when hackers hosed it clean of about 6,500 of its hidden services.

The admin says they’re gone for good: he hasn’t even figured out where the vulnerability is yet.

The administrator at Daniel’s Hosting is a German software developer named Daniel Winzen, who acknowledged the attack on the hosting provider’s portal. Winzen said that it happened on Thursday night, a day after a PHP zero-day exploit was leaked.

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The service will likely be back in December, he said, but even the “root” account has been deleted, and all the data on those 6,500 sites are toast: “There is no way to recover from this breach, all data is gone. I will re-enable the service once the vulnerability has been found, but right now I first need to find it,” the admin said.

According to Dark Owl, when the attacker(s) took out Daniel’s Hosting, they erased over 30% of the operational and active hidden services across Tor and the Invisible Internet Project (I2P) – an anonymous network layer that allows for censorship-resistant, peer-to-peer communication. ZDNet’s Catalin Cimpanu tweeted on Monday night that this pretty much matched his own calculations.

The attacker(s) also deleted over six million documents that DarkOwl – a provider of darknet content and tools, as well as cybersecurity defenses – had archived on the Dark Net.

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