Dark Web Hosting Provider Shuts Down After Hack

Daniel’s Hosting, one of the most popular dark web hosting providers in the world, has been shut down. The shutdown entailed the deletion of 7,600 dark web portals after the second hack in 16 months.

The hacker apparently deleted the entire database of the web hosting portal, which resulted in 7,600 web portals being taken offline.

The DH portal was hacked once before in November 2018. The hack was similar since the backend was breached and nearly 6,500 sites were completely deleted. However, since that hack, DH became the largest web hosting provider on the dark web. It took that title from Freedom Hosting II, which was another popular dark web hosting provider. Freedom Hosting II was taken down by Anonymous due to the presence of child abuse portals on their site.

DH portal had avoided this kind of predicament due to a moderation policy that helped Daniel take down such content.

The hack occurred on March 10^th, according to Daniel Winzen, the founder of the DH web hosting portal. The German software developer conceded that the hack had destroyed the entire database. It occurred due to access from the backend of Daniel’s Hosting (DH) portal. Since the service never kept backups by design, there was no way that any of the data could be recovered. The database of the DH portal was replaced by the hacker with a new one for future operations.

Daniel is yet to find out how the hacker managed to access the web portal. Winzen however, didn’t look too into the hack, because the DH site was a hobby. He has decided to spend the time he saves from not working on the site with his family. However, the one consolation is that the DH backend database account was hacked and not user accounts. While that may be true, he has cautioned the DH account users to consider their passwords leaked.

DH Shut Down

The web portal will probably remain down for the foreseeable future. It was a project that Winzen did in his spare time. According to him, it was consuming too much of his resources anyway; so it’s probably dead. He spent most of his time trying to keep the server clean and away from “scammy sites”. He was also finding it harder to continue development rather than just delete accounts.

He recommended other hosting sites like Freedom Hosting Reloaded, OneHost, IBHost, and Ablative Hosting as alternatives to his customers. However, he did say that the service may be relaunched at a later date. It would be far off in the future and with greater improvements and features.

He says that not having to administer the project will probably allow him more time for development. That being said, it will take months.