This looks like a good old "Kill the problem and frame him later" type of a take down. The owners (or some users) angered the wrong people, and now they are even the biggest pedos of the whole wide world...
Popular dark-web hosting provider hacked, 6,500 sites down
51–60 of 160 posts
Re: Popular dark-web hosting provider hacked, 6,500 sites down
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
People are silly. We look for silver bullets all the time. Political figureheads who look and sound good while lacking any depth, moustache-twirling villains to blame the bad times on, silly rituals which start because they accidentally coincided with good times, investment bubbles, and hubris followed by victim blaming.
There’s nothing which would cause an otherwise competent business leader to even realise they don’t understand the limits of any given security system, never mind knowing who to ask for advice.
Re: Popular dark-web hosting provider hacked, 6,500 sites down
#53I 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.
Genuinly curious: if you don't protect the host, how can you protect the users? Host has the power to change any content, including BTC addresses, text,...
Re: Popular dark-web hosting provider hacked, 6,500 sites down
#54"Backups? Forget it. This is the Dark Web. Winzen told ZDNet that there ain’t no such thing as backups on Daniel’s Hosting, by design:" I'm wondering why encrypted backup is not an option for them?
For the same reason why the NSA siphons up all data from the net, encrypted or not, and stores it. They know one day they'll be able to crack todays crypt. Being able to decrypt a backup 5 or 10 years from now will still provide a lot of useful data, whether it came from the darknet or someones icloud backup while it was in transit to Apples servers. Encryption really only protects you from "today", not what will hap…
Quantum cryptanalysis is no help with symmetric ciphers. All the data encrypted "at rest" via symmetric ciphers, which is what companies are usually bragging about, isn't affected.
Now, I'm sure there's a ton of data that the NSA will be able to break with quantum computing, because people often do transmit data by encrypting it with an asymmetric cipher, e.g. PGP. But... there's already work on quantum-proof asymmetric ciphers.
And TLS uses RSA, so maybe they can crack all the https traffic? Well, assuming today's algorithms are configured correctly, they employ perfect forward secrecy. That means the key exchange algorithms never transmit or store the encryption key, rather an emphemeral encryption key is recreated by both sides. Of course, even with PFS they do get all the metadata and certs when they crack RSA.
Re: Popular dark-web hosting provider hacked, 6,500 sites down
#55My bad. I signed up for my Free Dark Web Scan, and said my name was Philip'); DROP TABLE customers;--
Re: Popular dark-web hosting provider hacked, 6,500 sites down
#56I 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.
With the DNS and Alt-Src, are you saying that the Onion site identity can be verified by visiting the non-onion version of the site, and then relying on the header/DNS record to take the session onto Tor?
Then when the onion service private key is breached, the site operator just changes the header and DNS record to a new, non-breached one?
As you say though, querying these does reduce anonymity.
Re: Popular dark-web hosting provider hacked, 6,500 sites down
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Genuinly curious: if you don't protect the host, how can you protect the users? Host has the power to change any content, including BTC addresses, text,...
The hoster certainly has the power to scam people, but he doesn't have the power to deanonymise them.
Re: Popular dark-web hosting provider hacked, 6,500 sites down
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Genuinly curious: if you don't protect the host, how can you protect the users? Host has the power to change any content, including BTC addresses, text,...
In this case: protecting the users == hiding their origin
Re: Popular dark-web hosting provider hacked, 6,500 sites down
#59I 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…
No. That would be like someone taking GeoCities down in 1998 and claiming you took down 30% of "The Internet. You would have gotten a bunch of stuff, but obviously not 30%
At best they took down 30% of hidden web services with published addresses at aggregator sites like Hidden Wiki.
It's not that you don't know where its hosted, it's that you don't know who is using it or where they are. That includes publishers with hosted content, even from the host itself. 5Eyes couldn't just drop a tap in front of Danial's Host and see anything useful, just intermediate nodes with no idea what was on the other end. (barring a >51% attack where they own the first and last nodes in the circuit.)
Re: Popular dark-web hosting provider hacked, 6,500 sites down
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the same reason why the NSA siphons up all data from the net, encrypted or not, and stores it. They know one day they'll be able to crack todays crypt. Being able to decrypt a backup 5 or 10 years from now will still provide a lot of useful data, whether it came from the darknet or someones icloud backup while it was in transit to Apples servers. Encryption really only protects you from "today", not what will hap…
Just xor bit by bit against real random noise,embed it in a massive stream of other pure random, remember the offset, if it's really that important..
Don't roll your own crypto. If that was much better encryption, everyone would be using it.