Hackers compromised leading dark web hosting provider Daniel’s hosting and deleted all the hosting account from the server including the root user account.
According to Daniel Winzen analysis on November 15th the hosting server got hacked, hackers gained access to the server by using a PHP zero-day exploit that leaked before a day the server’s got compromised.
Hackers logged into the dark web hosting server through phpmyadmin and managed to delete all the accounts. More 6500 websites hosted on the dark web platform got deleted. Winzen says there is no possible way to recover the data from the breach.
He said ZDNet, “I would deem it as unlikely to have been the actual point of entry as the configuration files with database access details were read-only for the appropriate users and commands run by this vulnerability shouldn’t have had the necessary permissions.”
The Dark Web is defined as “the portion of the Internet that is intentionally hidden from search engines, uses masked IP addresses, and is accessible only with a special web browser: part of the deep web.
“Unfortunately, it is not possible to find the root cause by log analysis as on 14th at 5:33 the database had already been accessed with this user and it is unknown for how long the hackers may have had access to the database due to rotating logs frequently,” Winzen blog post reads.
The source code of Daniel’s dark web hosting platform has been available on GitHub which may facilitate the hackers to review the source code and to exploit the vulnerability.
Winzen said that he will re-enable the server once the vulnerability has been fixed, most likely the server will back up starting this December.