Anonymous, a collective of hacktivists known for waging cyber-operations against the U.S. government and big corporations, is now out to get Freedom Hosting, which it accuses of openly promoting child pornography.

The owners and operators at Freedom Hosting are openly supporting child pornography and enabling pedophiles to view innocent children, fueling their issues and putting children at risk of abduction, molestation, rape, and death, a press release on Operation Darknet stated. For this, Freedom Hosting has been declared #OpDarknet Enemy Number One. 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 100GB of child pornography.

Last week, Anonymous reportedly exposed a large Internet ring of pedophiles. It recently hacked into Lolita City, a darknet Web site allegedly used by pedophiles to trade child pornography. Anonymous then released the names and other information of more than 1,500 alleged pedophiles who reportedly were trading child porn.

Darknet Web sites are closed private networks of computers that are used for file sharing. They are part of what is called the Deep Web, whose content is hidden from the Surface Web that is indexed by standard search engines.

On Oct. 15, Anonymous issued Operation Darknet press released stating that while browsing the Hidden Wiki they noticed a section called Hard Candy, which provided links to child pornography. Anonymous said it removed all links on the Web site.

Within 5 minutes the links were edited back in by an admin, Anonymous wrote. For this reason, we will continue to make the Hidden Wiki unavailable.

The group said it found that 95 percent of the child pornography listed on the Hidden Wiki allegedly shared a digital fingerprint with the shared hosting server at Freedom Hosting.

Anonymous said that on Oct. 14 it identified Freedom Hosting as the host of the largest collection of child pornography on the Internet.

We then issued a warning to remove the illegal content from their server, which they refused to do, Anonymous said.

Around 11:30 p.m. that day, Anonymous said they entered Freedom Hosting's shared hosting server and shut down services to all its clients because of their lack of action to remove child pornography from their server.

But the next day Freedom Hosting restored services to their clients, Anonymous said.

We then issued multiple warnings to remove all child pornography from their servers, which Freedom Hosting refused to do, Anonymous said, noting that despite new security features, We once again infiltrated the shared hosting server at Freedom Hosting and stopped service to all clients.

Anonymous said it is demanding that Web sites hosting child pornography remove them from their servers.

Our demands are simple, Anonymous said. Refuse to provide hosting services to any website dealing with child pornography. This statement is not just aimed at Freedom Hosting, but everyone on the internet. It does not matter who you are, if we find you to be hosting, promoting, or supporting child pornography, you will become a target.

Cybercrime