On Sunday afternoon, large swaths of the so-called "dark net"—the network of web sites accessible only to people using the anonymity-enabling Tor software—went even darker than normal. The widespread blackout appears to be the result of an FBI sting, targeted at the trade of kiddie porn on the Tor Network. One cybersecurity researcher was watching the entire time, and offered Gawker a peek into one of the biggest attacks on the dark net in history.

The apparent sting has brought an unprecedented amount of attention to Tor, right as the world is mourning the death of privacy at the hands of the NSA. The Tor network is used by dissidents and journalists to evade government censorship and surveillance, and even the feds probably can't crack the underlying technology. But the sting highlighted another feature of the network, so-called "hidden services," which allow anyone to publish websites that hide both their creators' and visitors' identities. Browsing hidden services only requires downloading and installing an easy-to-use Tor Browser. From drugs to weapons to child porn, Tor has led to a black market e-commerce revolution.

Google doesn't index hidden services, so the Tor network has largely remained a web terra incognito to normal internet users. Explorers of the dark net usually have to rely on directory sites like The Hidden Wiki, which have spotty service and reliability. But an amateur computer security researcher who goes by the handle Gato Malo has been trying to map the contours of the dark net. Since March Gato Malo, who runs the blog USCyberLabs, and a partner have been running automated crawlers to harvest URLs and other data about Tor hidden services in order to create an easy-to-use search engine. They call their project "Artemis." Gato says Artemis has harvested around 55,000 URLs from about 6,700 different dark net websites. He estimates it's about 25% of all the hidden services on the dark net. "This is a tip of the iceberg," he said.

And it turns out Gato was running his crawlers last Sunday, right as huge swaths of the dark net went down. Sunday's blackout coincided with the arrest in Ireland on child porn charges of a man believed to run Freedom Hosting, the largest web hosting company on the dark net. Visitors to many Freedom Hosting sites found only error pages. Computer security researchers quickly discovered the error pages contained malware that spied on visitors and sent their ip addresses to a server in Virginia. This has lead to speculation the FBI had launched an unprecedented raid on the dark net, successfully exposing the trade of child porn that has long found a haven there. (The exact mechanism of the takedown hasn't been made clear.)

But it wasn't only child porn websites that went dark. By correlating the times that the error messages appeared on sites with the reported time of the Freedom Hosting takedown, Gato put together a list of 68 dark net websites that had been taken down and turned into spying machines. (This is only a fraction of all the sites that were hosted on Freedom Hosting, given Gato's limited sample size.)

A relatively small number appear to be kiddie porn sites. "I would say only 20, 25% of this list is pedophile sites," Gato said. The rest are a hodgepodge of dark net sites, both obscure and popular, illegal and legitimate. HackBB, a popular hacking forum, Noreason, a dark net technical resource, and the TorBackmachine, a dark net clone of the Internet Archive's Wayback machine, were among the other sites taken down.

The list, below, is an interesting cross-section of the dark net. It is not all, or even mostly, illegal stuff. As Gato and other security researchers shed light on the dark net, it's clear that something more interesting is going on: A parallel internet created and used by the cutting edge of privacy-obsessed geekery. The dark net has its own news blogs, forums and community, all infused with a weird, dislocated feel by the dark net's pervasive anonymity that's reminiscent of the early days of the commercial Internet. Obviously, it's good if the feds have found a way to target the trade of child porn on the Tor Network. But as the spotlight shines more brightly on the dark net, will the criminal underbelly take everything else down with it? That would be a shame.

Here's a full list of the descriptions of 68 sites Gato found, including some duplicates indicating multiple locations of the same site were crashed: editorial notes in italics



The Dreadful Onion Hunter « Login

Simon's Intel Tor directory

Anon comments only | tornado front end

Caravana Brasil • Índice

.onion観光案内所 入り口 - PukiWiki

UKetalar | UK Ketamine Vendor

Lista polskich stron – PB&M Wiki

Hosts a .onion site list and various .pdfs (Library Still Under Construction)

Login - Underground Market Board popular Tor forum

TorLinks | .onion Link List

Linki sprawdzone (Strona 1) - Pedo - Polish Board & Market

DeepChan - DeepWeb Tor Network 4chan clone

Collectors • Index page

.onion観光案内所 入り口 - PukiWiki

Lista polskich stron – PB&M Wiki

The USAHM Archive The Dark Net mirror of conspiracy website USA Hitman

BlackBin » 3dcacd "Free, anonymous, and uncensored tool for online communication"

Polska Ukryta Wiki Polish-language Tor directory

Fraud Network - Home Hacking forum

Simon's Intel Tor directory

Lista polskich stron – PB&M Wiki

KindzazaChan child porn site

Blue Quarters Infoa kaikesta kivasta

BlackBin » 3dcacd

はじめに - Total Sites found retrivied : 4

Millennium Board • Index page

OnionCams child porn forum

r/Onions: Welcome to the forum Tor subreddit mirro



BlackBin » 3dcacd

Lain Iwakura | Wellcome ;)

Extasy 120mg (Strona 1) - [Sprzedam] (N) - Polish Board & Market

はじめに

QTL CORNER • Index page

Area51 Archives - Contact Hacker culture wiki

Otwórz oczy - blog dla ludzi z otwartymi umysłami [light edition and backup for uaga3aoawaj6hohg.onion]

Lista polskich stron – PB&M Wiki

Lista polskich stron – PB&M Wiki

3D Boys • Index page child porn forum

Lista polskich stron – PB&M Wiki

hex space - ./releases

Web Design Guidelines: Onionland Style

The TorBack Machine wayback machine clone

TCF • Index page

NBPP < Narodowy Bank Polski Podziemne

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PSC (and other animals)

Forum of GnoM • Главная страница child porn forum

Acrimonious 2 Bitcoin escrow service

The Gates To The Clos Network wiki about clos networks

Paradise Village • Index page

Useless - A small lightouse in a sea of shadows

Simon's Intel

Difference between revisions of "Marketplace Reviews" - The Hidden Wiki

Aerie

Lista polskich stron – PB&M Wiki

Drugs - The Hidden Wiki

image uploader

Blue Quarters Infoa kaikesta kivasta

LEEME

Looking for "Sexual abuse" book

Notes // TORtiglione tor Microblogging site

BlackMarket Reloaded v.3 — Login

Lista polskich stron – PB&M Wiki

BlackBin » 3dcacd

SITES DEEP WEB - POR: ANONYMOUS BRASIL DEEP

The Dreadful Onion Hunter « Login

はじめに

Otwórz oczy - blog dla ludzi z otwartymi umysłami [light edition and backup for uaga3aoawaj6hohg.onion]

Blue Quarters Infoa kaikesta kivasta

[image by Jim Cooke]