“After looking through them there is at least one that we'd like to share with law enforcement before releasing it publicly. One vulnerable site crawled by PunkSPIDER contained particularly egregious content, ' a weird subset of child porn', Caceres told FORBES. Such flaws might offer investigators a path into the server and, with the right warrants, be useful for future investigations. But the creepy crawler could aid law enforcement, who might not want exploitable bugs on illegal sites patched by their criminal operators. The plan is to help improve security across the “dark web”, one of its numerous disputed noms de guerre. In a matter of hours last week, the entire semi-anonymising Tor network, where activists and criminals alike try to hide from the gaze of their respective authorities, was traversed by PunkSPIDER, an automated scanner that pokes websites to uncover vulnerabilities.Ĭreated by Alejandro Caceres and business partner Amanda Towler, PunkSPIDER, which provides a simple Google-like search tool for weaknesses in the vast number of indexable websites that exist today, has turned its gaze to Tor-based sites.

If you go down to the deep web today, you’ll be following hot on the heels of a digital beast.

Hacking sites on tor