Hackers affiliated with Anonymous on Friday took down a significant portion of the dark Web.

Visitors to more than 10,000 Tor-based websites running on the popular Freedom Hosting II provider for dark sites encountered an unusual message, according to The Verge. "Hello, Freedom Hosting II, you have been hacked," the message read.

The hackers said that about half the data stored on the affected servers was child pornography, though that claim has not been verified. They also offered to sell the compromised data back to Freedom Hosting II for 0.1 bitcoin, or about $100, though The Verge said "it is unclear whether the offer is in earnest."

Over the weekend, Motherboard got in contact with the hacker claiming responsibility for the intrusion, who told the site he's a newbie: "This is in fact my first hack ever," the person wrote in an email to Motherboard. "I just had the right idea."

The hacker said they initially gained access to the service on Jan. 30, just to take a look around. The person claims to have found 10 child porn sites with approximately 30GB of files. The hacker told Motherboard that Freedom Hosting II limits sites to 256MB of material.

"This suggests they paid for hosting and the admin knew of those sites," the hacker said. "That's when I decided to take it down instead."

Related Inside the Dark Web

The incident comes after Anonymous hackers in 2011 used brute force attack to infiltrate the original Freedom Hosting, which housed about 40 child porn sites. Then law enforcement took aim at the hosting provider in 2013 child porn bust, which led to several prosecutions.

According to a report from anonymity and privacy researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis, Freedom Hosting II — named after its predecessor — hosted close to 20 percent of all dark websites.

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