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.

The post Sharenting: Why shouldn’t we share photos of our children on social networks? first appeared on Counter Pedophilia Investigative Unit - Official Site.

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.

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.