Freedom Hosting

Freedom Hosting is a defunct Tor specialist web hosting service that was established in 2008. At its height in August 2013, it was the largest Tor web host.

Anonymous denial-of-service attack 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 Denial-of-service attacked (DDoS), and later had its member list leaked following a SQL injection attack, as was The Hidden Wiki which linked to it.

According to the investigation, “the hosting service contained over 200 child exploitation websites that housed millions of images of child exploitation material”. Essentially, they played host to the absolute worst of the worst.

US prosecutors, who have worked on the case for almost eight years, described Marques as “one of the largest facilitators of child pornography in the world.“

Some of the child pornography portals hosted on Freedom Hosting included Lolita City, the Love Zone, and PedoEmpire.

The service also hosted anonymous email service TorMail, dark web index HiddenWiki, and carding forum HackBB, along with other sites peddling various illegal services.

Users who wanted to host a site on the dark web accessed the Freedom Hosting site via the Tor Browser, registered an account, paid a $5 one-time fee, and then deployed their site on a classic PHP+MySQL hosting environment. At one point, it was believed that the site hosted about half of all dark web (.onion) sites.

All dark web portals were hosted on servers belonging to Marques’ real-world company, the now-defunct Host Ultra Limited.