Alleged Freedom Hosting Administrator Arrested

Monday, August 05, 2013

Eric Eoin Marques, 28—the “largest facilitator of child porn on the planet,” according to the FBI—was recently arrested and is currently in an Irish jail awaiting the conclusion of his extradition trial. The FBI aims to bring Marques to trial in the United States. If convicted, Marques faces up to 30 years in prison.

According to the information that's being released, it appears that Marques was the operator behind the notorious "Dark Net" hosting service known as "Freedom Hosting." The Dark Net AKA TOR's Hidden Services is a supposedly anonymous network in which servers are also hidden behind TOR proxies, while the user is hidden behind a TOR proxy - the idea being that anonymity of the both the server and user are protected.

For five years, both law enforcement and hacktivist vigilantes seemed incapable of shutting down the largest child pornography services on the Internet—virtually all of which were Freedom Hosting customers—thanks to the technology provided by Tor. Today, all of the major websites hosted by Freedom Hosting are down or are suspected of having been infected with malicious code. No one is sure how Marques was tracked down.

Famous child pornography websites such as Lolita City, the Love Zone, and PedoEmpire were customers of Freedom Hosting.

Complaints echoing from the pedophile camp (including talk of extreme measures such as suicide), all seem to confirm the accuracy of the reports that their Dark Net child pornography trading platform has been compromised.

An administrator of the famous 4Pedo forum noticed “unknown Javascript” on his own website on Saturday.

“Unknown Javascript in the board pages pointing to iframe to a Verizon server on the open web!” wrote 4Pedo’s owner. “They are inserted by Freedom Hosting! I would consider Freedom Hosting compromised! They are also in other TLZ and other site pages! Stay away from all Freedom Hosting sites including TLZ [The Love Zone], LC [Lolita City], TorMail, all of these are hosting on Freedom Hosting ! All boards have been deleted to protect you! If the boards come back up, it is not met running the site anymore! All admin/mod accounts have been deleted!”

The looming question will be: how many pedophiles who frequented these boards can expect a knock at their door within the next few months.

More information here: http://www.dailydot.com/news/eric-marques-tor-freedom-hosting-child-porn-arrest/

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