Anonymous brought down a major Internet porn ring and publicized the names of its patrons.

Hacker group Anonymous briefly crashed a large collection of child pornography Web sites, and published the names of its patrons.

Last week, the cyber vigilantes, better known for targeting large corporations and oppressive government regimes, used a brute force attack to infiltrate a server called Freedom Hosting, which housed about 40 child porn sites. The biggest site was Lolita City, which contained more than 100GB of content.

According to a timeline of events posted on Pastebin, Anonymous said before taking down the sites, it issued a warning to Freedom Hosting to remove the illegal content. When it failed to do so, Anonymous attacked. The sites were down for about five minutes before an admin restored them, upon which Anonymous again launched a successful attack. Later, the group posted on Pastebin the names of 1,589 individuals who visited Lolita City.

"If the FBI, Interpol, or other law enforcement agency should happen to come across this list, please use it to investigate and bring justice to the people listed here," Anonymous wrote in a statement.

The Anonymous operation was carried out by sub-group Operation Darknet, which targets abuse groups that swap images on the Tor network, an anonymous network routing service that hides a browser's location.

#OpDarknet calls Freedom Hosting "enemy number one" and is demanding the server remove all child porn content from the site and deny hosting services to any future child porn Web sites. "We will continue to not only crash Freedom Hosting's server, but any other server we find to contain, promote, or support child pornography," they said.

Anonymous, a controversial hacker coalition better known for police department emails and launching denial of service attacks , has received more support than usual for this latest attack against an undeniable moral enemy.

"Anonymous pwned a bunch of pedos; huzzah," tweeted @ioerror, or Jake Appelbaum.

"I totaly [sic] support this kind of hacking. Well done," tweeted Kat Corbett, a host for KROQ radio station in Los Angeles.

Others, like security expert Graham Cluley of Sophos, disagreed with Anonymous' action.

"Their intentions may have been good, but take-downs of illegal Web sites and sharing networks should be done by the authorities, not internet vigilantes," he wrote in a blog post. "When 'amateurs' attack there is always the risk that they are compromising an existing investigation, preventing the police from gathering the necessary evidence they require for a successful prosecution, or making it difficult to argue that evidence has not been corrupted by hackers."

In early August, the that it had dismantled a members-only child porn Internet bulletin board that was intended to promote pedophilia.

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