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More than 10,000 sites on the "dark web" was taken down last week by a hacker claiming to be affiliated with hacking collective Anonymous.

Someone claiming to be affiliated with Anonymous compromised a private web hosting service last week, taking down more than 10,000 sites on the highly encrypted "dark web," security researchers said.

As NBC News reports, the hacker or hackers broke into the hidden web hosting service Freedom Hosting II, claiming to have harvested all of the sites' files and its database, totaling almost 80 gigabytes of material.

"Dark web" is the term used to describe the networks of private sites that exist on the same public internet you use at home and at work but that are accessible only through special software or access configurations. 

Sites on the dark web are often used for legitimate, even laudable, purposes, such as protecting political and social activists' communications from opponents and repressive governments. But such sites are also often used — in back-alley locations that make up what is sometimes called "darknet" — to shield illegal activities from law enforcement, particularly black markets in weapons, drugs and child pornography.

Published at 8:26 PM EST on Feb 6, 2017 | Updated at 1:07 AM EST on Feb 7, 2017

Source: Hackers Take Down Thousands of 'Dark Web' Sites, Post Private Data

Shopify, the Canadian SaaS company that helps merchants create online stores, has found itself in the middle of some controversy involving a customer south of the border.

In an open letter published to Medium on Wednesday, Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke defended the company's decision to continue providing services to the online store for Breitbart, a controversial right-wing website. The company has received more than 10,000 messages asking it to fire Breitbart as a customer.

"The reasons we are continuing to host them are nuanced and require thought. It would be easy to kick off merchants we don't like, and doing so would actually make our lives significantly easier," he said.

"To kick off a merchant is to censor ideas and interfere with the free exchange of products at the core of commerce. When we kick off a merchant, we're asserting our own moral code as the superior one," he said. "But who gets to define that moral code? Where would it begin and end? Who gets to decide what can be sold and what can't? If we start blocking out voices, we would fall short of our goals as a company to make commerce better for everyone. Instead, we would have a biased and diminished platform."

"Instead of imposing our own morality on the platform, we defer to the law. All products must be legal in the jurisdiction of the business," Lütke said.

In the post, Lütke reiterated Shopify's role as a service provider, meaning that although it provides a service to a customer, it does not necessarily reflect the company's own views or values. Shopify has more than 10 percent of the overall e-commerce platform market.

"We offer a software service in the form of an ecommerce platform which hundreds of thousands of businesses and entrepreneurs use to sell millions of products online. We are a service provider. We do not, and will not, refuse the Shopify service to anyone based on their political views, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc. Doing so could set a dangerous precedent of exclusion," he said.

Web hosting companies and internet services providers of all types have had to answer similar questions in the past.

Back in 2013, Breitbart senior editor Milo Yiannopoulos was working as editor-in-chief of U.K. tech blog The Kernel when he published a report accusing Cloudflare of being "terrorists' little helper" for its refusal to stop providing services to a Chechen news agency. In 2014, Cloudflare launched a project to help protect public interest sites at-risk of being targeted by DDoS attacks.

"As part of that mission, we strongly believe that bullies should not be able to knock sites offline simply because they disagree with their content," Cloudflare says on its website.

Source: Shopify CEO Defends Right to Host Controversial Client Breitbart

Sun-News Reports , . 2:52 p.m. MT Feb. 8, 2017

SILVER CITY — The Small Business Development Center at Western New Mexico University is hosting series of four workshops for small businesses focused on digital media.

The workshops are designed to educate area business owners and non-profit organizations on how to grow their businesses through effective online marketing, branding and customer service tools.

"The question today is not whether to be online, or to have a well done website," said Lawrence Garcia, Small Business Development Center business advisor. "The real question is how far can you go in your online marketing journey."

Wednesday, February 15

Marketing Your Brand for Success (Part 1) with Sabrina Pack

5:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m., Student Memorial Center 3rd floor seminar room

Wednesday, February 22

Marketing Your Brand for Success (Part 2) with Sabrina Pack

5:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m., Student Memorial Center 3r floor seminar room

Wednesday, March 1

Optimizing Your Online Presence with Eric Spellman

3:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m., Student Memorial Center 3rd floor seminar room

Wednesday, March 8

Building Connections through Social Media with Abe Villarreal

3:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., Global Resource Center ABC room

Registration to attend each workshop is $10 per person. For more information, contact the Small Business Development Center at 575-538-6164.

Read or Share this story: http://scsun.co/2k4tF9n

Source: WNMU is hosting a series of workshops for small businesses

Details Written by Webmaster Category: Web Hosting Published: 07 February 2017 Hits: 5

Picking a good web hosting company is important to keeping your website open and your costs down. There are many to choose from, as well as different pricing plans to look over. Depending on the amount of sites that you intend on building, you may want to consider a larger web space in the long run.

You should start with the smallest web space that you can get to test the waters, just incase niche website Internet marketing does not work out for you. You may want to add on later, so make sure that your provider offers that option.

You will want to choose a provider that has a reliable service. If your site is down or takes to long to open up when visitors are trying to get in, it may lead them to click out of your site and move on to the next one. They will also more than likely not visit in the future since they will remember their bad experience. For this reason, it is probably best to stick with a well known company who you can check reliable references on. There are many small hosting providers that offer space for as low as $.50 to $1 per month, however, you never know what you will be getting and many of them want you to pay for at least a years worth in advance.

You will also want one that has the most affordable hosting. If you can create your own small site or have one made for you, then you will probably be able to find space for as low as $3 to $4 per month. However, if you need to choose a company that offers a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) website builder, then you will probably end up paying $10 to $15 per month for the smallest amount of space. But if this is the only way that you can build a site, then it is necessary.

Some web hosting providers may also offer a deal on a yearly URL or other products when you make a web hosting purchase.

Ultimately, whatever web hosting provider you choose will depend on your individual needs and what you can afford. Hopefully you will be able to snap up a well known provider at a low price who will allow you to upgrade your service as needed.

Source: How to select a good web hosting company for your business?

An Anonymous hacker claims they took down 10,000+ dark web sites because they many of them were hosting child abuse material and other harmful content.

On 3 February, visitors to 10,613 dark web sites running on Freedom Hosting II came across a message indicating someone had hacked the hosting provider. The message explains that hackers associated with Anonymous copied and downloaded 74 GB worth of files as well as a database dump of 2.3 GB. Anonymous then created torrents to the files (excluding user data) and to the database dump.

It all started when a single hacker acquired read access to Freedom Hosting II, which is believed to host as much as a fifth of all dark web sites, on 30 January.

It was their "first hack ever," and they only intended to see what Freedom Hosting II was powering. But the hacker's motivation changed when they saw numerous websites not only hosting child abuse material but also consuming more than the 256 MB of space freely allotted by Freedom Hosting II. (They were using gigabytes of material.)

The hackers also found that some of the sites were hosting scams, botnets, fraud, and/or hacked data.

As the hacker told Vice:

"This suggests they paid for hosting and the admin knew of those sites. That's when I decided to take it down instead."

The hacker used a 21-step process to pull off the attack. It involved messing with the configuration settings of a new or already existing Freedom Hosting II site and then triggering a password reset. The hacker then turned on root access before logging back in.

Anonymous, which for years has been opposed to dark web sites hosting child abuse material, provided the leaked files to Troy Hunt of Have I Been Pwned.

Hunt found that the files contain 381,000 users' email details. Some of those credentials he has already documented in his data breach search service.

All of this information will no doubt end up in the hands of the FBI at some point.

To be sure, the Bureau will be glad to hear the sites are no longer functioning. However, with the sites shut down, the FBI won't be able to infiltrate them and gather intelligence on members by deploying their own crafted spyware. This means that users whose credentials aren't included among the list of 381,000 login details could flock to another dark web site hosting equally harmful content.

Originally, the hacker demanded approximately US $200 from Freedom Hosting II for the return of their data. The hosting provider made two Bitcoin payments to the extortionist's wallet. Even so, the hacker decided to release the information anyway.

This takedown no doubt advances the fight against child abuse material hosted online. Let's hope it leads to some arrests, too.

About the author, David Bisson David Bisson is an infosec news junkie and security journalist. He works as Contributing Editor for Graham Cluley Security News, Associate Editor for Tripwire's "The State of Security" blog, Contributing Author to Carbonite, and Content Contributor to Metacompliance Ltd. and OASIS Open.

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Source: Anonymous hacker took down 10,000+ dark web sites, including child abuse content