Anonfiles – the notorious file upload site used worldwide by regular users and hackers alike has closed.
The site owners / administrators closed the site last week citing an an endless stream of users abusing the system.
Launched in 2011, AnonFiles.com became known as a popular hosting service that allowed users to share files up to 20GB without any download restrictions. In its heyday, Anonfiles quoted figures of 18 million users per month.
The site was put up for sale two years ago which is when the current owners took custodianship of the domain and the files it held.
After trying endlessly for two years to run a file sharing site with user anonymity, we have been tired of handling the extreme volume of people abusing it and the headaches it has created for us.
Maybe it is hard to understand, but after tens of million uploads and many petabytes later all work of handling abuse was automated through all available channels to be as fast as possible.
We have auto banned contents of hundreds of thousands of files.
Banned file names and also banned specific usage of patterns connected to abusive material to the point where we did not care if we accidental delete thousands of false positive in this process.
Even after all this high volume of abuse will not stop.
This is not the kind of work we imagine when acquiring it and recently our proxy provider shut us down.
This can not continue
Domain 4 sale
Anonfiles closure announcement
Hackers lose out
The closure of the site has left some hackers in a sticky situation.
The hacking gang 8Base, who I wrote about back in June were using Anonfiles as a repository for some of the stolen data they had acquired form their victims.
After the site went offline, 8Base administrators posted an announcement that “most of our file links have become invalid”.
This loss of data means that a victim of 8Base who might have been worried that their stolen data could be exposed to the world if they didn’t pay a ransom, should now be consoled by the fact that the data can never be exposed now that Anonfiles is no more.