Anonymous against pedos: Hackers hijack pedophiles' darknet image service

Anonymous has claimed responsibility for hacking the darknet upload service PedoBum. Child pornographic images were shared via PedoBum for years.

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2 min. read
By
  • Daniel Cooper
This article was originally published in German and has been automatically translated.

Activists from the hacker collective Anonymous claim to have succeeded in taking over the servers of the darknet upload service PedoBum (PB). Instead of child and youth pornographic images, visitors to the website are shown a confessional video by Anonymous. For years, PedoBum served as a central exchange platform for images in paedophile chats and so-called image boards: Instead of uploading individual images in the chat or forum, users were referred to the relevant image archive on PedoBum's servers.

In the confession video we received, the hacker collective threatens that user data will be passed on to the law enforcement authorities. They describe the administrator of the darknet service as a "clown" who has made it easy for the hackers. The threat must be taken seriously: According to our informants, PedoBum is said to have deliberately avoided JavaScript and other active content in the past. The site is now "JavaScript-infested" and attempts are even being made to load a Java application. Presumably an attempt to identify users on the darknet despite anonymization by the Tor browser.

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As part of their so-called Operation #OpPedoBum, which began on June 29, the Anonymous hackers also took over the link exchange platform Yet Another Topic Link (YATL). There, too, only the hackers' confessional video can be seen. It is not known whether Anonymous is also responsible for the fact that various other link collections and paedo chats are offline, or whether the operators have taken the servers offline as a precautionary measure to avoid being targeted by the Anonymous hackers.

(mid)