This past Thursday evening porn production company BangBros announced that they had acquired the obnoxious doxxing site PornWikiLeaks, which had trafficked in sharing personal details of more than 15,000 adult industry performers. As noted by Mashable, these personal details included the actual names of performers, in addition to much larger violations that include info on their families, their addresses, and even their phone numbers.
BangBros' purchasing of the site may have only seemed odd for about a second, but they quickly made it clear that they had bought it to wipe it clean...even going so far as to burn the hard drive (as you can see above).
Furthermore, they also posted a message on PWL's homepage that explained the reasoning behind their purchase. A chunk of that message, which was addressed to their "fellow industry peers," reads:
BangBros had enough. We have purchased this site with the intention of shutting it down and removing all information associated with it. There’s no catch. No hidden thing to getting your personal stuff off of it. We simply didn’t want it out there for the world to see anymore. Yes, it’s that easy. While shutting this site down doesn’t purge the internet of all possible ties to real names and what not, it does make it one less place to harbor and find these things easily. A forum that had 300,000 posts on it, most of them negative and hate-filled, has now disappeared.
BangBros' message also included a note ensuring that, at least this particular site, would never be making a comeback. As they put it:
If you had anything ever posted on here, it will be removed and deleted forever from here. As well as BangBros nows owns the domain. Nothing will ever be up here besides this page that you see now. So you don’t have to worry about it coming back either.
As if replacing the site's content and setting the hard drives aflame weren't enough, Bangbros also got the site's archive excluded from the Internet Wayback Machine, thereby making cached data even more difficult to locate.
Though it probably goes without saying, their series of moves was appreciated by those within the industry:
