Anonymous has been very public in the last several months about its various attacks on web sites owned and operated by the federal government and businesses. Much of their attacks have been blatantly illegal, even though the group believes its actions to be justified. Now comes word that Anonymous has gone after a group that is far worse; operators of child pornography sites.
Security News Daily reports that the group started "Operation Darknet" over a week ago when it discovered a secret network of web sites under the name the Hidden Wiki. These sites contained links to child porn sites that were being hosted by something called Freedom Hosting. Anonymous decided to put its efforts to attacking and shutting down Freedom Hosting"s servers and it seems to have succeeded.
In a statement on the Pastebin web site, Anonymous said, "By taking down Freedom Hosting, we are eliminating 40+ child pornography websites, among these is Lolita City, one of the largest child pornography websites to date containing more than 100 GB of child pornography. We will continue to not only crash Freedom Hosting"s server, but any other server we find to contain, promote, or support child pornography."
Now this is the kind of hacking we approve of. Anonymous as a whole may have some ideas about the government and businesses that we don"t agree with but there"s no disagreement that child porn in any form is reprehensible and should be eliminated. The kinds of people who sneak around and create shadow web sites and file servers to distribute child porn are the lowest of the low and we doubt that law enforcement officials would argue with Anonymous" attempts to do away with this kind of behavior.