More good news!
A 2 year investigation into child pornography trading on the darkweb has just concluded with massive amounts of arrests across Europe, USA, Turkey, Peru, Chile, Ukraine, Israel and Malaysia .
The bust centered around a specific darkweb site called "PlayPen", that has been running since August 2014 and had at least 150,000 users around the world.
The sites founder Steven W. Chase (Florida, 58) was sentenced to 30 years prison as well as two administrators facing 20 years each.
Europe accounts for the major share of arrests and convictions with 368 suspects being charged. A total of 870 arrests were made in connection with the case, according to Europol.
Over 300 children who had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of Playpen members have been identified or rescued.
Like we've seen in similar cases, once investigators had tracked down the server they compromised it and used it to serve malware to its clients in order to track them.
This part of the operation was codenamed Operation Pacifier.
The FBI’s command of the Playpen site enabled the agency to infect over 8,000 users’ computers with malware and hack them. Notably, the site was said to be more efficient and even experienced a boost in audience numbers with the FBI in charge of its content.
Whilst I really have zero sympathy for child pornographers, the EFF does make some good points about the way this was handled:
“The warrant here did not identify any particular person to search or seize. Nor did it identify any specific user of the targeted website,” Electronic Frontier Foundation said, calling into question the legality of the FBI’s actions.
900 down, millions to go.
Source : ‘Playpen’ Creator Sentenced to 30 Years - Fbi.gov May 5th
