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New Mexico asks BitTorrent what it does to stop child exploitation
New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas is worried that technology is enabling child exploitation, and he's putting pressure on the companies creating that technology. His office has sent a letter to BitTorrent asking it to cooperate with an investigation into tech aiding child exploitation. The official wanted to know what BitTorrent is doing to block, monitor and report illegal material in its uTorrent client, and was concerned that the company's Cyber Ghost VPN was helping criminals hide their tracks by securing traffic. He also asked for subscriber counts in the state and the number of people removed so far.
EFF: Geek Squad has been working with the FBI for a decade
When the defense in a California doctor's child pornography case accused the FBI of paying Geek Squad's crew to look for evidence in the defendant's computer, Best Buy denied it enjoys close ties with the agency. Now, according to the EFF, the big-box retailer's team of IT technicians are even closer to the feds than previous reports indicated. The non-profit has received the results to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) it filed last year and found that Best Buy has been enjoying "a particularly close relationship with the agency" over the past 10 years, at least.
Inmates used smartphones to swap child porn in prison
Prosecutors have charged a group of inmates at a federal prison in New Jersey for downloading child porn from the dark web to their smuggled phones, according to NBC News. They even stored videos and photos that show kids, including babies and toddlers, being sexually abused in a cloud account they all shared. While the prosecutors announced charging five people to the public -- and all five were imprisoned for child pornography -- one of them secretly collaborated with the investigation.
Facebook admits its image screening fell short
To say that Facebook has some egg on its face right now would be an understatement. The social network not only didn't take down some sexualized images of children, but reported the BBC when it drew these images to its attention. However, the company now says it has turned a corner. Facebook's Simon Milner tells the UK's Home Affairs Committee that the incident showed the company's moderation system "was not working." The offending photos have since been taken down, he says, adding that the process should be fixed.
Mozilla fails to get the details on the FBI's malware hack
Mozilla has to take another approach if it wants to discover and fix the vulnerability feds exploited to infiltrate a child porn website. Washington US District Judge Robert Bryan has thrown out the organization's request for the security flaw's details. If you'll recall, the FBI seized the server of a child porn website on the Tor network called Playpen in early 2015. They then used a flaw in the Tor browser, which is based on Mozilla Firefox, to install malware that pointed agents to users' locations. They nabbed over a hundred people from that sting, including a defendant in one of Bryan's cases.
Many legal porn sites are fronts for child abuse
There has been a sharp increase in the number of websites hiding illegal images of child abuse behind otherwise legal-seeming adult pornography sites, the UK-based Internet Watch Foundation reported this week.
Court rejects child porn case evidence FBI got through malware
A Massachusetts court has thrown out evidence for a child porn case that the feds obtained by using malware. Christopher Soghoian from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) told Motherboard that "[t]his is the first time a court has ever suppressed anything from a government hacking operation." If you recall, the FBI took over a child porn service on the Tor network called Playpen to infiltrate pedophiles' computers from all over the world. The agency collected over a thousand IP addresses from users in the US. They then arrested a bunch of people based on their investigation, including Alex Levin, whose lawyers filed a motion to suppress: a request asking the court to disregard a particular evidence.
FBI must reveal the code it used to hack Dark Web pedophiles
A judge has ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to turn over the complete code it used to infiltrate a child pornography site on the Dark Web, Motherboard reports. The FBI seized the Tor-based site known as "Playpen" in February 2015 and kept it running via its own servers for two weeks -- during this time, the bureau deployed a hacking tool that identified at least 1,300 IP addresses of visitors to the site worldwide.
FBI Dark Web hacks were a part of a global child porn bust
That FBI hacking initiative that caught 1,500 pedophiles on the Dark Web? It was just the tip of the iceberg. Motherboard has discovered that the operation was just one part of Operation Pacifier, a global campaign to fight child porn hidden through anonymity networks like Tor. The effort had the FBI hacking systems as far afield as Chile, Denmark and Greece -- there are also hints of possible operations in Colombia and Turkey. The US agency wasn't working alone, either, as it teamed up with Europol to collect information and pass it along to local law enforcement.
FBI hacked the Dark Web to bust 1,500 pedophiles
The Federal Bureau of Investigation infiltrated and shut down what it called "the largest remaining known child pornography hidden service in the world" this summer, using a hacking method to track IP addresses on the Dark Web, Vice Motherboard reported. The Dark Web bulletin board site, named "Playpen," launched in August 2014 and within one year had garnered 215,000 accounts with 11,000 unique visitors each week.
Microsoft launches cloud version of child porn detector
Microsoft has launched a cloud version of PhotoDNA, its free technology designed to detect images depicting child sexual abuse, giving more services and websites the chance to use it. PhotoDNA has been around for years, helping big companies like Facebook and Twitter (as well as Microsoft's own services OneDrive and Bing) identify illegal photos for purging. However, the original version has to be loaded onto a company's own servers to work and possibly requires hiring additional personnel with the technical knowledge to run it. Now that there's a version that runs on Microsoft's cloud, it can be used even by smaller companies and non-profit orgs.
