I am confused: is this seriously saying that over 30% of "hidden" services were being hosted on the server of one guy named Daniel?... that in a world where the entire point is that you don't know where anything is hosted and you are using tons of indirection through Tor to ensure there is no obvious place to hook all of the traffic or even see packets for timing attacks, it turns out there was a one in three chance that the traffic was being hosted by this one guy named Daniel?
Popular dark-web hosting provider hacked, 6,500 sites down
41–50 of 160 posts
Re: Popular dark-web hosting provider hacked, 6,500 sites down
#42I guess that all of the private keys for the onion services will be gone too. Even if they aren't, they can't be used anymore anyway as they should be assumed to be compromised. I hashed for a month to get a vanity one, others have done longer. Did this hosting service allow custom private key uploads?
Also, if private keys were obtained, it's trivial to republish to the same onion address with any changes you want. This is that one scenario where an EV cert that can be revoked has value if you're a non-anonymous hoster. There are other alternative-factor identity verification techniques (e.g. DNS, Alt-Svc HTTP header) but the querying aspect reduces anonymity.
Re: Popular dark-web hosting provider hacked, 6,500 sites down
#43Man, why do people insist on using others to host their tor hidden services? It seems like the last thing you'd want or need to do. It's super simple to set up a hidden service from your home computer and host. I've been putting all my clear web sites on tor as well for years. Lots of bot traffic but never any problems and plenty of real traffic too.
The same reason people host their emails, websites, photos somewhere else or host their infrastructure in the cloud instead of colocating. It’s not hard but just another thing you have to care for when your real focus should be on what you provide not how you provide it.
If secrecy/anonymity is important enough to put something on the dark web, using the same assumptions as you might on the public internet is silly.
Re: Popular dark-web hosting provider hacked, 6,500 sites down
#44I am confused: is this seriously saying that over 30% of "hidden" services were being hosted on the server of one guy named Daniel?... that in a world where the entire point is that you don't know where anything is hosted and you are using tons of indirection through Tor to ensure there is no obvious place to hook all of the traffic or even see packets for timing attacks, it turns out there was a one in three chance…
doesn't surprise me that the initial layer of obscurity provided by TOR gave people a false sense of security.
Re: Popular dark-web hosting provider hacked, 6,500 sites down
#45Give it about...a month and there will be 13,000 onion sites to take its place.
hail hydra
Re: Popular dark-web hosting provider hacked, 6,500 sites down
#46So, lots of pages, on one hosting site.
Someone hacked a PHP site, more at eleven…
Re: Popular dark-web hosting provider hacked, 6,500 sites down
#47"30% of the dark web was erased."
More like "what was loosely estimated to be 30%"
Re: Popular dark-web hosting provider hacked, 6,500 sites down
#48> there are no backups.
Interesting. If I were into this kind of activity I would love to have backups designed, implemented and maintained the "dark" way. It seems to me that by just running the services you are not 100% into this business. You'd have to come up with the whole "dark ops" approach.
Re: Popular dark-web hosting provider hacked, 6,500 sites down
#49I am confused: is this seriously saying that over 30% of "hidden" services were being hosted on the server of one guy named Daniel?... that in a world where the entire point is that you don't know where anything is hosted and you are using tons of indirection through Tor to ensure there is no obvious place to hook all of the traffic or even see packets for timing attacks, it turns out there was a one in three chance…
That 30% is clearly a gross estimation, and certainly a wrong one with no data to back it up. Still, even though it is definitely counter productive to host on a widely known host, it still does not expose any users, and that is the main point, not really protecting the host.
Re: Popular dark-web hosting provider hacked, 6,500 sites down
#50It will be interesting to see a followup in a few months, in particular, to see how many sites come back online.
My expectation is that a good number will look to an alternate service, though the ones who are willing to try again would be more likely to have recovery plans.