14 DAY TRIAL // Hell, a long-lasting hacking forum that existed on the Dark Web for years but got unceremoniously shut down last summer, returned online, but some users are now showing their distrust at the new service.
Most professional hackers were well aware of the forum's existence, and most kept it a secret to avoid a skid invasion that would water down the site's quality.
The Adult Friend Finder data dump forced the forum to close down
All of this secrecy got shattered when someone posted a database of around 3.9 million users from adult hookup site Adult Friend Finder. The data, which contained everything from names and passwords to sexual preferences, leaked on the Internet, where users started sharing it via social media, and later got a lot of coverage from mainstream media.
Soon after, the site's admin, a user called Ping, disappeared, and later resurfaced after users started spreading rumors that he was arrested.
The site closed down in July, reappeared after two weeks, and later shut down for good.
Hell returns and is now open to the public
Now, according to Vice's Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, one of the original forum's moderators, a user named HA, has built an almost perfect clone of the original forum and made it available over the weekend at the legionhiden4dqh4.onion ULR (Tor link, not accessible via normal browsers).
Unlike the original forum, which was a private community that rarely accepted new members, this new version, called Hell Reloaded, is open to public registration.
Because anyone can sign up, and because there's no trace of the original site's founder, some users have called it a blatant honeytrap, a fake website set up by law enforcement to trap and spy on the underground hacking scene.
As with another recently resurrected version of the Darkode forum, most users won't trust an underground hacking forum that shut down operations in a suspicious manner, and chances are that Hell will only be a ghost town.
