The content hosted by AHS was quite disturbing as the images depicted the violent and brutal sexual abuse of minors. The web hosting service contained well over 8.5 million child abuse images while the law enforcement had no information about 1.97 million of the victims.
The Freedom Hosting service came under an official investigation towards the end of 2011 when it found itself in news headlines after members of the Anonymous collective exposed it as a primary host of child pornographic content on the dark web and bombarded the site with huge DDoS attacks.
Owner of dark web Freedom hosting pleads guilty to host child abuse content
That incarnation was believed to account for a great deal of the child abuse images hosted on the dark web and yet new services quickly sprang up to fill the gap. Depressingly, the same will probably happen now that its successor has disappeared.
Security researcher Chris Monteiro has analyzed some of the dumped data. He says he discovered .onion URLs hosting botnets, fraud sites, sites peddling hacked data, weird fetish portals, more weird stuff, and child abuse websites targeting both English and Russian speaking buyers [NSFW links].
New York-born Eric Eoin Marques, 36, a citizen of both the US and Ireland, ran a network of dark web servers that hosted over 200 websites distributing millions of images and videos containing child sex abuse, according to the prosecutors' statement. Marques called the entire network "Freedom Hosting."
Marques pleaded guilty in February 2020 to creating and operating a web hosting service called "Freedom Hosting" on the darknet between 2008 and 2013. The darknet is part of the internet but hosted within an encrypted network. It is accessible only through anonymity-providing tools. 2ff7e9595c
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