A US court sentenced 36-year-old Dubliner Eric Eoin Marques, who ran Freedom Hosting from July 2008 to July 2013. The company provided darknet hosting services to over 200 sites that hosted material related to child exploitation and child sexual abuse.
Investigation
Eric Eoin Márquez, a dual citizen of the United States and Ireland, was sentenced to 27 years in prison, as well as life supervision by the authorities after he served his sentence and was released. In addition, Marquez was banned from using the Internet for life “except as previously approved by the oversight officer.”
In a statement, the US Department of Justice said that “Marquez was one of the largest distributors of child pornography in the world.” Similar statements were made in 2013 when Marquez appeared in court in his native Dublin: then FBI special agent Brooke Donahue described Markers as “the largest intermediary in the field of child porn on the planet.”
“More than 1.97 million images and videos [of child abuse] were previously unknown to law enforcement. Many of these materials include sadistic abuse of infants and young children, including bondage, bestiality and bullying, including urination, defecation and vomiting, ”the Justice Department said in a statement.
Investigation into the activities of Freedom Hosting began in 2011 when the service hit the pages of the world’s media. The fact is that then Anonymous exposed the hoster and named it the main source of child porn on the darknet, organizing powerful DDoS attacks.
Details of how the FBI subsequently tracked down Marquez are unknown to this day. It is only known that he was arrested two years later, in July 2013. All sites hosted by Freedom Hosting were closed a week later, on August 3, 2013.
Marquez fought for six years against extradition to the United States and even tried to obtain Russian citizenship, but the Irish authorities nevertheless transferred him to the United States in March 2019, and a year later, in February 2020, he pleaded guilty.
However, the investigation into Freedom Hosting was remembered not only for the huge amount of monstrous materials that law enforcement officers then discovered. The fact is that this was one of the first known cases when the FBI used malware as part of an investigation.
According to court documents released years later, following the takeover of Freedom Hosting servers in late July 2013, the FBI left the infrastructure operational for another week by secretly deploying a JavaScript file across the hoster’s sites. This script exploited a bug in Firefox to bypass Tor’s anonymization functions by collecting the real IP addresses of users. This information was then transmitted to the FBI server and was later used to conduct other investigations and capture other suspects of paedophilia.
Freedom Hosting
Freedom Hosting once hosted child pornography sites such as Lolita City, Love Zone, and PedoEmpire. The service also hosted the anonymous mail service TorMail, the HiddenWiki directory of darknet sites, the HackBB carding forum and many other sites selling various illegal services and materials. In essence, all of these sites were hosted on servers owned by Marquez’s company, the now-defunct Host Ultra Limited.
Users who wanted to host a site on the darknet logged into Freedom Hosting through Tor, signed up for an account, made a one-time payment of $ 5, and then deployed their site in PHP and MySQL. At some point, it was Freedom Hosting that hosted about half of all dark websites (that is, in the .onion zone).
Although in the end, Freedom Hosting “went to the bottom” and its collapse was widely covered by all the world’s media, the service soon had imitators. The most famous of these is Freedom Hosting II, which offered similar hosting services and used the same brand. In 2017, he too was hacked by Anonymous hacktivists (again in revenge for child porn), just like his predecessor. After that, the researchers wrote that during the attack 10,613 .onion sites were compromised, and the total number of darknet sites ultimately decreased by 85%.
Alas, after Freedom Hosting II, others appeared, including Freedom Hosting III and Freedom Hosting Reloaded, the latter still working.
Catch up on more stories here
Follow us on Facebook here