There is a formal system for deciding whether an issue should be shared, known as the Vulnerabilities Equities Process.
Sometimes these are disclosed to technology vendors, while at other times the government decides to keep these exploits for use as weapons or in investigations. US government agencies regularly find software vulnerabilities in the course of their security work. The ACLU criticized the FBI for indiscriminately using the code like a “ grenade.” While in control of Freedom Hosting, the agency then used malware that probably touched thousands of computers. The code had attacked a Firefox vulnerability that could target and unmask Tor users-even those using it for legal purposes such as visiting Tor Mail-if they failed to update their software fast enough. Hours later, as panicked chatter about the new code began to spread, the sites all went down simultaneously. When Marques was arrested in 2013, the FBI called him the “largest facilitator” of such images “on the planet.”Įarly on August 2 or 3, 2013, some of the users noticed “unknown Javascript” hidden in websites running on Freedom Hosting. It also maintained servers for the legal email service Tor Mail and the singularly strange encyclopedia Hidden Wiki.īut it was the hosting of sites used for photos and videos of child exploitation that attracted the most hostile government attention.
The operation existed entirely on the anonymity network Tor and was used for a wide range of illegal activity, including the hacking and fraud forum HackBB and money-laundering operations including the Onion Bank. Freedom Hosting was an anonymous and illicit cloud computing company running what some estimated to be up to half of all dark web sites in 2013.
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