Hacker group Anonymous performs 'vigilante' attack on online child porn hub



Hacker group Anonymous has switched its attention to online repositories of child pornography - and claimed to have 'knocked out' one of the highest-profile sites in the world

'Hacktivist' group Anonymous has fired the first shot in what it claims will be a war against Internet child pornography.



The renegade hacking collective - which has been criticised by law enforcement agencies in the US and the UK - shut down the largest host of such illegal material on the Web.

Anonymous has posted reactions from chat users said to be paedophiles furious at its actions, which include a British user who claims to have hosted a site which earned him £600 a day.



'What are the ****s that brought down Lolita City?' he said, 'My site is bankrolled by the Russian mob.'

In a statement issued on the internet, Anonymous said that it had warned Freedom Hosting to take the sites down but the company failed to do so.



Anonymous hackers then disabled its servers and would continue to do so until the material was removed.



The group claims at least 40 websites have been shut down, accounting for more than 100GB of content which depicts children being abused.



It also infiltrated the user database and has published the account details of 1,569 paedophiles online.



The attack is a change of tack for Anonymous which has previously attacked companies such as Mastercard, Visa, and Paypal in response to the card companies' refusal to process donations to Wikileaks.



Its latest operation began on October 14 and targeted child porn on the ‘darknet’ - anonymised sites designed to protect users' identities, which are invisible to normal web users.

A video message on the Operation Darknet Twitter feed warns that the campaign will be ongoing

Anonymous hackers detected the links to the pornography and removed them but they were up again within five minutes.



They then discovered that 95% of the links were being hosted by Freedom Hosting and so shut down the firm’s servers.

Freedom Hosting switched to their backups but Anonymous closed them down again.

