For most of the regular Dark Web users, the news about the shutdown of the biggest hosting provider, Freedom Hosting II took down by the hacker group anonymous was a great shock but it was mainly to the Child Pornography distributors and addicts. Now ninth OnionScan reports reveal the state of the Onion services is currently towards extinction from the latest date analysis of the OnionSphere collectively gathered from the largest OnionScan Crawl.
From all the OnionScan reports, the issues identified was hosting an anonymous service was difficult. After the Freedom Hosting was taken down and an OnionScan crawl examined nearly from 30,000 onion sites revealed only 4400 hidden services were online. Our team believes that all other Onion Sites are now defunct.
You might have heard about the popular Encrypted email provider Sigaint has suddenly disappeared which may be linked to one of the hosting providers.
The overall size of the Dark Web Sites in decreased by 15-20 % after the collateral attack on the Freedom Hosting II.
The March 2017 report says the makeup of the Onion sphere is 4000 HTTP found, 250 TLS services, 270 SSH, lesser than 10 FTP and 220 Bitcoin Nodes. Nothing has changed much SSH endpoints are down after the downfall of FHII, In terms of security, the state remains the same.
One slight increase is the number of misconfigured Apache Installs lies between 7-10%. The Dataset was able to reveal nearly 1000 Unique IP Addresses from the clearnet clients and services accessing these mod_status exposed sites.
But the question arises why Tor-based services have been removed? Furthermore, The skills required to run a Tor hidden service requires high technical abilities and maintaining it anonymously on Tor is much difficult. This doesn’t mean that OnionScan is going away.
More references to @OnionScan in academic work. https://t.co/qw1VbPyJ2y pic.twitter.com/TogPHFlt93
— Sarah Jamie Lewis (@SarahJamieLewis) March 10, 2017
Sarah Jamie Lewis the Project director at OnionScan believes ” a tool that can be used by anyone that will host a hidden service securely, privately and anonymously. A tool that will empower and aid the user in making decisions that protect themselves and others.”
The twists and turn off such events will surely give answers to all our questions in the near future. Let’s hope it does.
