The Fingerprint

Publishing or uploading images, videos or any other type of recording associated with our children on the Internet in general, and on social networks, creates a digital footprint and exposes them to the different dangers that come with browsing the web. Even the information that parents share on social networks about their children can pose security risks and fraud.

The main risks that the public profiles of parents in social networks and messaging services, among others, that they can carry are the following:

• It can lead to both physical and digital identity hijacking.
• When minors access social networks, they can use these photos or videos to be the subject of memes, or any form of bullying on the networks.
• During the adult lives of current minors, they may be victims of identity theft.
• Digital reputation. When adult minors want to access prestigious institutions, the members of the selection committee will be able to access all the applicant’s information, especially social networks.

If we send images or videos via instant messaging (such as WhatsApp), we need to make sure that the people we send any content to are trustworthy and will not share it without our permission.

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Information Center Filled with Pictures

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children is an office with federal jurisdiction in the USA. It works with every public security agency. Last year, this office managed to compile, at least, 70 million pictures and videos with illegal content showing child sex abuse.

The Center reported that the amount of video shared through social media reached a record. Luckily, these illegal videos have always been popular among sex predators, and now these are more easily detected by some of the aforementioned digital companies.

More than 41 million videos were reported, an alarming figure if compared to five years ago, which it did not go over 350 thousand. Many of the pictures and videos were pinned down in multiple occasions as users received them.

The Center shared with the journal department of The New York Times which digital platforms reported the most amount of pictures of child sex abuse. The report details as follows:

Facebook: 60 million pictures and videos. The figure represents more than 85% of the total amount.

Instagram: now from Facebook, was responsible for 1.7 million additional pictures and videos.

Instagram has been the social network of choice by pedophiles; however, Facebook’s Messenger is taking the lead; the number of user can be reason of the increase.

Facebook claims that half the content found does not fully qualified as illegal, but it was reported as such to support the investigations from different public security institutions on this matter.

Snapchat, Twitter, and other social network companies also handed their reports on the pictures taken on their platforms. Moreover, search engines like Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, and the chat platform, Discord, also detected illegal content.

Children are not Adult Entertainment

An adolescent notified the adult web site, Pornhub, which the video of her rape was posted on the platform with very explicit taglines about what the users would watch. Not only the victim had to face the trauma for the rape, but the online exposure made her relive the attack over and over again.

The crime happened back in 2009, when the victim was 14 old. Two men recorded certain moments of the rapping and post them on the web site. Few months later, several people of her school shared the link of Pornhub, where there was various videos posted of the attack she was submitted to.

It was not until she pretended to be a lawyer ready to sue that the aforementioned web page removed the videos. For the victim, each of the 400 thousand views felt as a new attack.

The web site stated that accusations for videos with illegal content date back to 2009, with the previous headboard, and nowadays there are more strict measures and policies to fight unauthorized and illegal content as part of their stand against promotion of material displaying child sex abuse.

Currently, digital platforms use sophisticated technologies based on the experiences of their workers to detect, report, and eliminate any a/v material with illegal content or with child abuse, as well any attempt of sharing said content. Many companies train their own staff, others use third parties like Vobile, specialist in digital identification, who compares all new posts against potentially unauthorized material, and it makes sure that original video does not make it into the platform.

The post Instances of Online Child Sex Abuse on the Rise first appeared on Counter Pedophilia Investigative Unit - Official Site.

A space of all your own, and full of danger

According to experts, TikTok is a network in which children and teenagers enjoy space of their own, free of parental interference or supervision, since accounts aren’t shared.

Data provided by Digiday points out that 60% of the network’s users are aged between 16 and 24, though there are probably younger users. The network’s main objective is for its users to have fun creating music videos, duets and challenges; it also has a wide range of creative options, meant to attract members of the GenZ.

The app makes it difficult to verify users’ actual ages. This problem is present in all social media platforms, but in TikTok’s case the issue is more pressing due to the high amount of minors using it.

This Chinese network has yet to be included in the Global Internet Forum. It’s also under investigation in the United Kingdom due to fears it may become a pedophile magnet. It’s a cyberspace in which victims and aggressors can easily cohabit: cases have been reported of children having been subjected to grooming.

British newspaper The Sun looked into many of them, especially one in which the 8-year-old victims received a number of TikTok messages sent by adults, threatening them in order to gain sexual favors.

Minors still make regular use of the app, unaware of the fact that they can become victims. Even worse, children still don’t know in which servers the videos are stored.

Chicken Nuggets and ice cream

Another social network in the hot seat is Facebook. A new strategy implemented by pedophiles everywhere in order to attract, grow close to or attack children is to pretend to be inanimate objects in order to contact them.

In order to attract potential victims, aggressors use pictures of food as avatars, such as ice cream or chicken nuggets, or names of famous streets. Some use it only to access photos of children, others to contact them.

Previous estimates placed Instagram as the network where most pedophiles contacted children, followed by Facebook. With this new method of attack, perverts have found yet another way to access private photos from minors, by hiding behind a fake profile.

Parents must be aware of the kind of pictures children upload to the web, and not only on social media. Portals such as Musical.ly attract children as young as 5, 6 and 7 since it can be used to lip-sync to their favorite songs, including short videos where they dance as their favorite singers.

A girl whose account had only 20 followers –four of which she didn’t know—received anonymous messages in which someone suggested she would get more likes if she sang in her underwear.

It’s important to know that if a child constantly publishes photos of his or her surrounding, criminals can locate them and potentially attack them. For this and many other reasons, it’s of the utmost importance to monitor all minors’ web activity.

The post TikTok has to pay millions in fines for storing data from children first appeared on Counter Pedophilia Investigative Unit - Official Site.

10.000 pics on social networks

In Colombia, a man was captured after the authorities found out more than 10 thousand pictures of victims in his social networks -all of them between 9 and 14 years old-. The victims were from Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, and Argentina.

The aggressor created fake profiles in his cybercafe and used them to act as if he was another kid. He intended to get the other children’s attention. Once he did that, he managed to gain these minor children’s trust and personal information, mostly girls. Once he got what he wanted, he asked them for sexual content images that he would use to threaten them so he could force them to send more pornographic material.

During the last nine years, at least 5,583 cases of sexual crimes related to Internet access have been presented in Colombia. However, only 1,083 have been resolved this year; among these cases, we can find:

• 202 grooming cases (fake profiles created by adults to get closer to their underage victims).
• 281 sextortion cases
• 73 cyberbullying cases
• 93 unauthorized sharing cases, related to sexual content images.

Sexual child abuse content is not only found in the deep web and the dark web. This content can also be found in covered pages in browsers like Google, social networks, WhatsApp groups, and other messaging apps.

Besides keywords like Caldo de Pollo, Club Penguin, Código Postal or CP, among many others whose initials coincide with Child Pornography; pedophiles also use symbols to identify sexual child content on the Internet.

A blue double triangle is used to represent boy sexual abuse on the Internet. The symbol is known as Blogo or Boy lover. Some variations include thinner lines that mean that it is related to younger kids, while thicker lines refer to older boys or teenagers.

On the other hand, the double heart symbol exists or Globo, Girl Lover, used to identify pedophiles that prefer girls. Those places with mixed content identify themselves with a blue butterfly and a pink one, Go. Some of these symbols belong to trademarks and were plagiarized with another purpose.

Combating pedophilia through a backdoor

To fight pedophilia, countries like the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Australia, have encouraged Facebook to allow the police to special access some content if the social network keeps going with its messaging services encryption.

Authorities -in an open letter for the social network’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg- asked easier and faster access to users’ communications in cases of terrorism or pedophilia suspicion. They are asking for legal access to these communications’ content, in a simple and usable format.

The end-to-end encryption prevents other people from accessing messages sent through direct conversations. The reason to ask the social network to change this is that Facebook Messenger has become the pedophiles’ favorite messaging service. They use it to stalk and harass their victims and share pornographic content.

Facebook has said that this encryption is used to protect people’s privacy while they are connecting with each others and that they do not have access to chat’s content. Also, they condemned that these security tools are being used to commit crimes. Besides, they are responsible and they promise that they will work with law enforcement authorities to prevent these things as much as possible.

The social network works on improving its abilities to identify and detain aggressors and criminals in all its apps. They are using a pattern detection system and some other tools, even when they cannot check the content of the messages.

The post Child pornography: How do pedophiles hide on the Internet? first appeared on Counter Pedophilia Investigative Unit - Official Site.

Free platform.

Humankind’s worst things and behaviors may be exhibited on the Internet, and it may let it go just because is a free-use platform. We are talking about terrible content that infiltrates through the web that does not make it up for the damage it causes or the intentions behind its publication. Also, the organisms that must be regulating this problem act passively, resulting in letting the amount of child pornography content increase each year.

The investigation holds that there are, approximately, 45 million videos and pictures of girls and boys being sexually abused. At least, 10 thousand pages on policial reports and legal documents that show technology and its developers do not have the tools required to stop this kind of content’s proliferation, without giving it the same treatment that is applied to hate-speech-based messages or terrorist propaganda.

When it comes to this kind of content’s presence and the way the models used by pedophiles to transfer the information safely escalates, institutions like the National Center for Disappeared and Exploited Children advise that the number of reports exceeds the response capacity that the involved organizations and the forces of law have. They cannot make effective moves against this problem.

Since 1998, when there were 3,000 cases of child abuse reported, the amount has been increasing, year after year, until 2018, when there were 18,4 million cases of child abuse-related content reported.

The problem is that the victims fear of being recognized by their photos or videos on the Internet, after having their lives shattered by the abuse perpetrated by relatives or strangers.

Thinking about this issue, there is a victim that was filmed while being abused by its father when the attacked one was 11 years old. It does not matter how hard this person tries to feel good and overcome that disgrace, the footage keeps the abuse breathing 20 years later and it will make it harder to forget it.

How the material get to the web

The reported material has a regular flow after being uploaded to the web. Once identified, it is reported by other users or the companies that provide Internet services. After this, the whole problem is in the law’s hands. Legal actions are taken after the specialist review the material. The most used platforms for child-abuse-related material are:

• FTP
• E-Mail
• P2P
• Chatrooms
• Instant messenger
• Forum
• Gaming
• SMS
• Cell phone
• Tor
• URL

The top three countries with the largest child pornography traffic is conformed by:

1. India
2. Indonesia
3. Thailand

The top five is completed if we add Mexico and Bangladesh —positions 4 and 5 respectively— to that list. After these countries, we find the United States and Brazil with the highest number of reports related to their population.

The investigation also revealed that there are groups online dedicated to share images of younger kids and extreme abuse forms through encryption technologies and the dark web: the place on the Internet where everything is illicit and where information about how to commit the crimes, how to record the abuse, and how to share the images taken from the act, is given to pedophiles around the world.

These traffickers are at the forefront of technology to distribute the child-exploitation materials; they cover their fingerprints by connecting to private hidden virtual networks that allow them to

• Cover their locations.
• Deploy encryption techniques.
• Hide messages.
• Share on the dark web.

Social networks —like Facebook— and search engines —like Google— improved their platforms’ vigilancy, but they are required to report only when the child abuse images are discovered. The procedures may take several months, and sometimes they only answer to say that there is not a record, even when it is about reports that already started the legal process.

The social network Facebook announced its plans to cipher Messenger in March, considering that the last year, it was responsible for almost 12 out of the 18,4 million global reports related to child sexual abuse material.

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