Lolita City, and other alleged child porn websites, attacked by Anonymous

The hacktivist collective Anonymous has declared war on internet paedophiles, attacking websites it accuses of carrying child abuse images and videos, and declaring that anyone who hosts, promotes or supports child pornography is a target.

In an operation dubbed “Operation DarkNet” or “OpDarkNet”, the loosely-knit group has claimed responsibility for taking offline over 40 websites accused of sharing child abuse material, and has published details of 1589 alleged paedophiles that had been using the websites.

In particular the hackers targeted a site called “Lolita City”, and crashed the servers of its web hosting service Freedom Hosting. In a statement, Anonymous called “Lolita City” one of the “largest child pornography websites to date containing more than 100GB of child pornography”.

Here is part of the statement from Anonymous that was published on the internet:

Did the Anonymous hackers do the right thing?
I don’t think so. Their intentions may have…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.