Security News > 2020 > February > Freedom Hosting owner pleads guilty to distributing child abuse images
The man arrested for running what was once believed to be the largest child abuse hosting provider on the dark web, has pleaded guilty in a US court to the charge of advertising child pornography.
The defendant's anonymous web service hosted dozens of insidious criminal communities dedicated to the sexual exploitation of children and spread millions of images of that abuse.
The volume of child abuse images and videos hosted on Freedom Hosting is said to have reached a combined total of over 10 million, uploaded to a range of hosted sites by individuals who assumed that being on the dark web accessed via Tor protected them from discovery.
It later emerged that the FBI was using a previously unknown vulnerability in Firefox 17 to serve JavaScript code used to unmask the real IP addresses of users who visited sites hosted by Freedom Hosting.
In 2017, hackers claimed they'd accessed a large volume of data connected to a more recent site, Freedom Hosting II, unconnected to Marques.