The dark web can be a, well, dark place. It's mostly famous as a place to buy illegal drugs and to hire assassins, but there are bad guys on there as well.
A series of exposes from Motherboard has shone a light on the darkest corners of the dark web, focussing particularly on paedophiles, violent porn and bestiality, and now they are reporting on a hack that has broken open the email addresses, dates of birth and private messages of over 3,000 users on a bestiality website.
Security researcher Troy Hunt, who works for the website Have I Been Pwned?, told Motherboard of the hack and tweeted: "Animal bestiality website had 3.2k accounts compromised. The data included email and IP addresses, dates of birth and passwords stored as bcrypt hashes."
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The website, delved a little deeper and downloaded the dataset, which was available on a public forum. They ran a few of the email address to test their accuracy and found them to be real.
According to Motherboard, they are 'not naming the site because it seems inappropriate, in a similar way to naming a child abuse site, to more easily direct potential users to offending material'.
They added: "Motherboard downloaded the dataset from a public forum discussing the breach, and verified many of the email addresses contained in the dump are connected to active accounts on the site.
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For dozens of tested addresses, when trying to create an account with one of the emails, the site returns an error message: "Email is already used by another user!"
Not all of the 3,000 email addresses could be linked back to real emails, but a significant proportion were.
It is also possible that people could have signed using email addresses that belonged to other people, as there was no verification system inherent in the bestiality website.
Bestiality website are illegal in 45 of 50 states in the USA, so anyone whose email has been found could potentially face criminal charges.
Topics: online, Hack, News, US News, tech