The hacktivist group Anonymous has always seemed a little murky. Are they the good guys or the bad guys? In instances like these it's clear that you want the hackers on your side.
Last February an unknown hacker for the group made a huge dent in the dark web, taking down over 10,000 sites after they found it to be hosting a huge amount of child pornography.
The hacktivist breached Freedom Hosting II (FH2), the hosting provider for a fifth of all dark web sites which is accessible only through the anonymous web browser Tor.
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Visitors to over 10,000 hidden services hosted by the provider - also including Ponzi schemes and hacking forums - would have been surprised to find the sites taken down with viewers redirected to a message from the Internet vigilantes instead.
Amazingly, the hacker responsible told Vice that the hit was their 'first hack ever'. Their original plan had just been to observe sites hosted on FH2 rather than hack it.
However, the vigilante decided to step in when they found several large child porn sites larger than FH2's stated data allowance.
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"This suggests they paid for hosting and the admin knew of those sites. That's when I decided to take it down instead," the hacker said.
While getting child porn off the dark web is obviously the right thing to do, for dark web researchers and law enforcement the hacker's noble-minded move has brought unfortunate consequences.
Anonymity and privacy researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis said that the hack of FH2 will have inadvertently affected many sites on the dark web which weren't peddling illegal porn.
"This is a major blow considering many were personal or political blogs and forums," Lewis told The Verge. "In the short term, a lot of diversity has disappeared from the dark web."
The hacker may also have affected investigations into crime on the dark web which are reliant on hacking dark web services and, crucially, leaving them running.
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In the past, the FBI took over the original Freedom Hosting, using malware to grab IP addresses and try to identify individual users. With the sites now taken down, investigators' jobs may be a bit tougher.
Ultimately, the dark web is an enormous thing - estimated to hold over 7,000 terabytes of info, no one quite knows how much seedy stuff is in there. If there are now a couple fewer horrific sites on the Internet, surely that's worth at least some celebration?
This isn't the first time that hackers have done good deeds for the world. Last November young Iraqi hackers embarrassed the terrorist group Isis by flooding its propaganda channels with porn.
No doubt we'll see more stories about hacktivists emerge this year. We'll be watching you, Anonymous.
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