Hackers targeted the leading dark web hosting provider Daniel’s hosting and deleted all the hosting account from the server. They also hacked the root user account.
Hackers used a PHP zero-day exploit to gain access to the server.
Hackers logged into the dark web hosting server through phpmyadmin and managed to delete all the hosted accounts. More than 6500 websites hosted on the dark web platform got deleted. Daniel Winzen, the software developer behind the hosting service says there is no possible way to recover the data from the breach.
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He said ZDNet, “I would deem it as unlikely to have been the actual point of entry as the configuration files with database access details were read-only for the appropriate users and commands run by this vulnerability shouldn’t have had the necessary permissions.”
The Dark Web is a popular platform for illegal activities. This is the portion of the Internet that is intentionally hidden from search engines. The dark web uses masked IP addresses and is accessible in a special web browser (Tor).
Winzen also said in a blog “Unfortunately, it is not possible to find the root cause by log analysis as on 14th at 5:33 the database had already been accessed with this user and it is unknown for how long the hackers may have had access to the database due to rotating logs frequently”.
Daniel’s dark web hosting platform source code is available on GitHub. So this may allows the hackers to review the source code and to exploit the vulnerability.
Winzen said that once the vulnerability has been fixed, he will re-enable the server. It is expected that the server will back up starting this December.
