Leading dark web hosting services provider Daniel’s Hosting has been hacked, taking about 6,500 sites offline.

The free hosting service was targeted on Thursday in an apparent attack by hackers so gained root access via phpmyadmin and adminer to take control of the hosting server and then delete all of the sites.

Founded by Daniel Winzen in 2013, Daniel’s Hosting offered free accounts for onion sites on the dark web — a shady part of the internet reachable with special software — with some restrictions. Exactly what was contained on the deleted sites isn’t clear, but Winzen pitched the service as a place for more legitimate content versus some of the more nefarious types of content and commerce the dark web is best known for.

Since the service was also pitched on privacy grounds, there are no backups of the deleted sites, so the hosting service cannot be reverted to a previous, nonhacked state.

“There is no way to recover from this breach, all data is gone,” Winzen wrote Friday. “I will re-enable the service once the vulnerability has been found, but right now I first need to find it. Most likely in December the service will be back up.”

The source of the hack has not been confirmed, but that hasn’t stopped various sites speculating on who may be behind it.

Security Affairs noted that cybercrime syndicates, nation-state hackers, intelligence and law enforcement agencies are all possible suspects with valid motivations. Latest Hacking News suggested it may be the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Dark-web hosting sites have been targeted in the past, but usually because they hosted illegal content. Although it’s not known what Daniel’s Hosting was hosting, if it was hosting illegal content Daniel Winzen’s public presence, including a GitHub page, would be odd.

Some of the better-known dark-web takedowns include Freedom Hosting in 2013 and an operation lead by Anonymous in 2017 that brought Freedom Hosting II down. The latter was the largest hosting provider on the dark web at the time and host to a range of illegal activities, including child pornography.

Image: Public Domain Pictures