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Daniel's Chat

Dasho

What is it?

Daniel's Chat is one of the most popular real-time chats, serving the dark web since 2015. It was created by Daniel Winzen. This chat has a complicated history... and a sophisticated present (not really but that sounds cool doesn't it?), and I hope to capture most of that here...

History

The chat was originally made as a PERL CGI-script which is available here. The chat was later converted by Daniel into a PHP script, available here.

... (it's very long so I just stuck it all in here)

I have since found evidence that Lucky Eddie wrote up the chat script originally for nefarious reasons (he was a pedophile), and to my knowledge he was arrested in late 2019. Below is an exert from the staff notes of one of darknet's most infamous pedo chats, BoysPub. From the exert we gather that Lucky Eddie had an account in their community, or in another notorious pedo chat named Campfire, or both.

*******************************************************   
*                                                     *
*   19.11.19 [SCAL] Lucky Eddie from Campfire and     * 
*   creator of LE.PHP has been arrested in Germany    *
*   We must assume his account has been compromised   *
*   as well.                                          *
*                                                     *
*******************************************************

Triumphantly, this chat, along with its forum 'BoysTown', has been seized by law enforcement and taken down.

Despite the troubling moral question of using a script with such an ugly backstory, it is probably the most popular PHP script on darknet, with hundreds of chats built using it (including my own). The chats extensive list of features, coupled with its compatibility with tor makes it an ideal choice for many chats that use tor, both good and bad.

https://www.darkowl.com/blog-content/daniel-of-the-darknet-goes-dark wrote:
The Anti Child-Exploitation Community

Daniel’s darknet notoriety increased in 2016 when he ported Lucky Eddy’s perl-CGI LE-Chat script into PHP with mySQL or PostgreSQL backend, optimizing the environment for Tor and decreasing the darknet community’s reliance on Javascript, thus allowing for image sharing inside a chat platform (which is not available via XMPP and IRC) without potentially compromising posters’ identities. As a result, Daniel’s LE-Chat code became a popular platform for the darknet pedophilia community, and the home for many well-known Child Pornography sharing chatrooms such as Tabooless, Camp Fire, and Child Priori.

Individual “pedo-hunters” and anti-pedophilia groups have called for hacking Daniel’s services using large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) campaigns, specifically because it was rumored that the principal administrator and some key staff members were active in pedophilia-specific chats.

Syntax

It's hard not to talk about Dan's Chat without mentioning its ex-admin, syntax. I do not know enough regarding syntax to make my own comments about them, although much that is established is that they're female, and that people wither like 'her' or hate 'her'. Also covered on DarkOwl is....

https://www.darkowl.com/blog-content/daniel-of-the-darknet-goes-dark wrote:
Anti-Syntax Club or an Inside Job

For over a year, the nickname Syntax has been referenced with either extreme love or extreme hate. Hundreds of trolls have posted across forums and paste sites about how this purportedly 17-year-old female teenager is responsible for taking down a number of pedophilia chatrooms and community leaders in recent years. Since early this fall, there has been an increase in the number of anti-Syntax trolls repeatedly calling for attacks against Daniel’s services, more specifically Syntax and her ally ChatTor, since she was promoted to Super Moderator of Daniel’s popular and drama-filled chatroom during the summer and accused of abusing the position.

Other members have suggested the remote possibility the attack on Daniel’s was led by Syntax and ChatTor so that they could take administrative control of the chatroom, although a recent image capture from ChatTor states that it was simply about being at the right place at the right time.

More of the syntax drama is available at https://www.darkowl.com/blog-content/daniel-hosting-goes-dark-for-good, as follows:

https://www.darkowl.com/blog-content/daniel-hosting-goes-dark-for-good wrote:
Target: Daniel’s Chat SQL Database

. . .

Then, at 02:51 UTC, a chat user named @Dolly emerged without “entering,” stating that the hackers stole @daniel’s chat password and that the server itself had not been compromised. @Dolly also said, “Doesn’t look like you can delete @Syntax” suggesting that @Dolly was likely an alternate account for the chatroom’s controversial super administrator, @Syntax. She also confirmed that @daniel was not logged in as he was not usually awake this early to do so.

@Dolly’s arrival prompted dialogue between the hacker @null and chatroom users, while @Syntax expressed less interest in fighting and was more interested in discussing the “reasoning” behind the hack.

At one point, @Dolly commends the alleged responsible parties by saying“I'm kinda in awe as to what you did.”

. . .

For the next hour, @Syntax along with various guests and transient members chatted about random subjects ranging from EU and German laws around pedophilia to the 19th Amendment, while random trolls entered and continued to attack only @Syntax directly. One chat member and presumed online boyfriend of @Syntax, known by the moniker @Fuggles, joined the chat and had little to say.

One guest to the chatroom suggested the hack was organized by @Syntax to breakup with @Fuggles, while another long-time user and former staff of Daniel’s Chat, known as @meerkat simply hypothesized that the hacker @null and @Syntax were one and the same person - essentially alleging that this was orchestrated from the inside.

By 04:00 UTC, the hacker kicked @Syntax and all guests using variations of her nickname from the room. Less than 10 minutes later, @null stated Daniel’s Chat was the last site left on Daniel’s Hosting. This suggests that while everyone was conversing, the hacker/s were busy deleting the web services hosted on Daniel’s servers by elevating the privileges of @daniel’s admin account. We find this to be at least partially true as it appears that the hackers targeted Daniel’s databases via the chatroom and not the web server content, like raw HTML and CSS files.

At 04:31 UTC, Daniel’s account simply announced, “pwned.” At 04:32 UTC, the chatroom returned displaying the message, “Fatal error: No connection to database!”- suggesting the hack was complete and the chat database was no longer online.

Less than 5 minutes after the chatroom went offline, a single post appeared on the drama and spam-filled Tor hidden service, DeepPaste, with the hackers blaming staff pedophiles and Syntax directly for the attack against Daniel’s services. The hackers also included a link to another external hidden service on Tor with a list of all the filters from the admin panel in the anonymous chatroom. It is rumored staff moderators used the extensive list of filters, consisting of mostly keywords and URLs linked to illegal subject matter, for auto-kicking guests posting banned content.

The reason for posting this - along with their final statement - is unknown and the service containing the filters is no longer online.

And of course this as a final juicy nugget of the history:

https://www.darkowl.com/blog-content/daniel-hosting-goes-dark-for-good wrote:
No database backups

Speaking of server setup, strangely, Winzen did not maintain any archives of the SQL databases he hosted as evident by data loss, nor were backups of the deleted databases available when he was hacked previously in late 2018. Many darknet users have expressed increasing skepticism that Daniel was not as committed to his darknet projects as he would have liked everyone to believe. After the most recent database breach, one anonymous user suggested that @null’s reference to the chatroom being a honey-pot was legitimate, adding suspicion over a server upgrade or move occurring only weeks before the most recent attack occurred.

Those who suspect that Daniel’s chatroom was actually a honey pot surmise that Daniel didn’t maintain backups of his data because they were being monitored (and probably managed) by international or German law officials. This was supported by the fact that a change in rule regarding sharing any pornographic content occurred in 2018, around the same time that Daniel was hacked and their databases disappeared.

There have been numerous pastes circulated around the darknet in the last year claiming many of the members, including @Syntax were Law Enforcement.

Present

After that roller coaster of a history, you may want to know where it is now.

Dan's Chat seems as popular as ever, and it is one of my favorite chats to hang out on. With the strict moderation, and clear rules, there's hardly any trouble over there anymore, and it is littered with many interesting members and staff. It is currently admined by Freyja, who also goes by the name Elune sometimes. Supporting admins include Dusted and Dotty, and if you visit, you're sure to see a few recurring faces like Foxy, span, Surf, and piroc.

Given the complexity of darknet, it's a good place to start. It also seems to be a darknet Hub of sorts, where you can find a lot of the names you'll find on others forums and communities.

cshup_d19

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