Anonymous Hackers Target Pedophiles

Members of Anonymous recently announced the launch of OpPedoChat, which targets Web sites used by pedophiles.

“Lately, there has been a surge of websites dedicated to pedophiles for chat, picture sharing, etc.,” the group’s Pastebin statement reads. “These sickos openly advocate concepts like ‘man-boy love’ with statements such as ‘If the boy [in this case only 8 years old] is asking for it, we shouldn’t deny him.’ This is not limited to boys, boards for little girls exist as well and operate with impunity. Child pornography is frequently traded and even innocent pictures of random children (at the beach, on a playground, etc) are publicly fantasized about. This is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. WE Anonymous aim to diminish if not eradicate this plague from the Internet.”

“OpPedoChat follows earlier campaigns by sections of the hacktivist groups that subjected websites linked to the distribution of paedophile material with denial of service attacks and membership exposure,” writes The Register’s John Leyden. “For example, Operation Darknet in October 2011 targeted hidden child abuse hubs on .onion domains, only accessible to Tor users or through Tor gateways. This time around the hacktivist group has set its sights on 100 domains that host forums allegedly used by child abusers for chat and picture sharing.”

“Anonymous has promised ‘defaces, logs & dox and the occasional domain hijack as well,'” writes ZDNet’s Emil Protalinski. “In fact, the first round is already complete, and has been split into four parts of doxing (the act of tracing someone or gathering information about an individual using sources on the Internet). … The publicly posted information includes the details of hundreds of pedophiles (both users and administrators of these websites) as well as e-mails between some of them.”