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Freedom Hosting
Freedom Hosting was a Tor specialist web hosting service that was established in 2008. At its height in August 2013, it was the largest Tor web host.
In 2011, Anonymous launched Operation Darknet, an anti-child pornography effort against activities on the dark web. One of the largest sites, Lolita City, hosted by Freedom Hosting, was subject to a denial-of-service attack (DDoS), and later had its member list leaked following an SQL injection attack, as was The Hidden Wiki which linked to it.
In 2013, through undisclosed investigative methods, the FBI identified the IP address of a server that appeared to be associated with Freedom Hosting. The server was hosted by OVHcloud and was contracted under the name of Eric Marques. On July 22, 2013, pursuant to a mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) request to France, U.S. law enforcement received a copy of the data and information from this server. The server contained several encrypted "containers" for which law enforcement was unable to determine the content at the time. By July 30, 2013, investigators, through the use of cryptanalysis, were able to determine the password for the server's superuser account ("root"). This enabled law enforcement to obtain an unencrypted copy of the server's contents, confirming that the server was indeed hosting the Freedom Hosting website.
On August 4, 2013, several Tor hidden services hosted by Freedom Hosting, including TorMail, began displaying an error message. Source code analysis revealed the presence of a small JavaScript executable that exploited a vulnerability in outdated versions of the Tor Browser. The executable retrieved the Windows hostname and MAC address of the user's computer, transmitting this information to a server controlled by U.S. law enforcement.
The FBI acknowledged they were responsible for the attack in a 12 September 2013 court filing in Dublin; further technical details from a training presentation leaked by Edward Snowden showed that the codename for the exploit was EgotisticalGiraffe.
The site was founded and administered by an American-Irish citizen, Eric Eoin Marques (born April 29, 1985), who was born in New York City to an Irish mother and a Brazilian-born Portuguese father who worked as a successful architect. He had been referred to a psychiatrist as a young teenager with no specific diagnosis made. He was described as timid and socially withdrawn, and had failed to complete school.
In 2005, Marques started a business named Host Ultra with his father before dissolving it in 2011. His father had justified the large amounts of money Marques made by claiming he worked at a bank.
Marques was arrested in Ireland on 1 August 2013, on a provisional extradition warrant issued by a United States court on the 29th of July that year. The FBI sought to extradite Marques to Maryland on four charges — distributing, conspiring to distribute, and advertising child pornography — as well as aiding and abetting advertising of child pornography. The warrant alleges that Marques was "the largest facilitator of child porn on the planet". His attorneys fought for several years to prevent his extradition to the United States on the grounds that he had Asperger's syndrome and would not receive the appropriate care in a US prison if extradited.
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Freedom Hosting
Freedom Hosting was a Tor specialist web hosting service that was established in 2008. At its height in August 2013, it was the largest Tor web host.
In 2011, Anonymous launched Operation Darknet, an anti-child pornography effort against activities on the dark web. One of the largest sites, Lolita City, hosted by Freedom Hosting, was subject to a denial-of-service attack (DDoS), and later had its member list leaked following an SQL injection attack, as was The Hidden Wiki which linked to it.
In 2013, through undisclosed investigative methods, the FBI identified the IP address of a server that appeared to be associated with Freedom Hosting. The server was hosted by OVHcloud and was contracted under the name of Eric Marques. On July 22, 2013, pursuant to a mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) request to France, U.S. law enforcement received a copy of the data and information from this server. The server contained several encrypted "containers" for which law enforcement was unable to determine the content at the time. By July 30, 2013, investigators, through the use of cryptanalysis, were able to determine the password for the server's superuser account ("root"). This enabled law enforcement to obtain an unencrypted copy of the server's contents, confirming that the server was indeed hosting the Freedom Hosting website.
On August 4, 2013, several Tor hidden services hosted by Freedom Hosting, including TorMail, began displaying an error message. Source code analysis revealed the presence of a small JavaScript executable that exploited a vulnerability in outdated versions of the Tor Browser. The executable retrieved the Windows hostname and MAC address of the user's computer, transmitting this information to a server controlled by U.S. law enforcement.
The FBI acknowledged they were responsible for the attack in a 12 September 2013 court filing in Dublin; further technical details from a training presentation leaked by Edward Snowden showed that the codename for the exploit was EgotisticalGiraffe.
The site was founded and administered by an American-Irish citizen, Eric Eoin Marques (born April 29, 1985), who was born in New York City to an Irish mother and a Brazilian-born Portuguese father who worked as a successful architect. He had been referred to a psychiatrist as a young teenager with no specific diagnosis made. He was described as timid and socially withdrawn, and had failed to complete school.
In 2005, Marques started a business named Host Ultra with his father before dissolving it in 2011. His father had justified the large amounts of money Marques made by claiming he worked at a bank.
Marques was arrested in Ireland on 1 August 2013, on a provisional extradition warrant issued by a United States court on the 29th of July that year. The FBI sought to extradite Marques to Maryland on four charges — distributing, conspiring to distribute, and advertising child pornography — as well as aiding and abetting advertising of child pornography. The warrant alleges that Marques was "the largest facilitator of child porn on the planet". His attorneys fought for several years to prevent his extradition to the United States on the grounds that he had Asperger's syndrome and would not receive the appropriate care in a US prison if extradited.
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