Freedom Hosting II Data Breach

What happened

In January 2017, the free hidden service host Freedom Hosting II suffered a data breach. The attack allegedly took down 20% of dark web sites running behind Tor hidden services with the attacker claiming that of the 10,613 impacted sites, more than 50% of the content was child pornography. The hack led to the exposure of MySQL databases for the sites which included a vast amount of information on the hidden services Freedom Hosting II was managing. The impacted data classes far exceeds those listed for the breach and differ between the thousands of impacted sites.

Exposed data

Recommended actions

• Change your Freedom Hosting II password immediately, and update it anywhere you reused the same password.
• Enable two-factor authentication on the affected account and on your critical services (email, banking).
• Watch for targeted phishing emails referencing Freedom Hosting II — attackers weaponise breach data quickly.
• Check whether your email address appears in this breach on haveibeenpwned.com.