Hackers have deleted more than 6,500 sites being held on Daniel’s Hosting, one of the more popular dark web servers.

The hosting site, which is now out of action, was on the hidden Tor network and was often used to host pages users did not want to publish on the regular world wide web.

No back-up

Daniel’s Hosting administrator Daniel Winzen said there are no back-ups of the hosted pages, which were deleted on November 15.

He added: “Around 6,500 hidden services were hosted on the server. There is no way to recover from this breach. All data is gone.”

The server hosted an array of material, such as pornography, hacked files, videos, fan fiction, philosophy books, whistleblower documents and cryptocurrency forums.

The hosting site is expected to be operational again in December, Winzen explained, although he is yet to discover the vulnerability that was exposed by the hackers.

One of the most plausible explanations is a recently discovered vulnerability in PHP, which some hackers were sharing among themselves shortly before the server was breached.

When the site returns, Winzen says he plans to make some alterations to “some bad design choices of the past”, which he hopes will improve how the server runs.

Although the Anonymous hacking collective has been responsible for takedowns of other dark web hosts, it is still not clear who attacked Daniel’s Hosting or why the pages were wiped.