The Times
As many as 10,000 Britons signed up to one of the world’s largest paedophile networks, which operated on a clandestine part of the internet for almost two years without police shutting it down. An NHS employee, a former school governor and a sex offender who once worked at a children’s hospital were among 80,000 users registered with Paradise Village, one of the largest child abuse websites on what is known as the dark net.
Members openly discussed their sexual interest in children, posted links to child abuse imagery and videos, and left friendly comments on each other’s posts. By using anonymising software called Tor they masked their online identities. The Times was able to analyse the network’s server, Freedom Hosting II, after usernames, email addresses and passwords were hacked by anonymous vigilantes and placed on the open web. Information on 50 British users, whose login details appear to match those used to create profiles on Facebook and other social media, will be passed to the National Crime Agency (NCA) today.
NCA officers would not confirm whether they had been aware of Freedom Hosting II before it was hacked in February, leading to its closure. The earliest website on the server was created in 2014 and more than 155,000 users joined child abuse sites hosted there. Were it not for the hack, the sites might well have remained accessible.
The findings come as concern grows over the proliferation of paedophile sites on the dark net. On Friday The Times reported that more than 280 suspected British paedophiles had been arrested as part of a huge global operation against child abuse on the dark net. Those arrests relate to Playpen, a forum that was shut down by the FBI in 2015. Many of its 150,000 users appear to have migrated to Freedom Hosting II. Hackers found that child abuse forums made up the vast majority of the content of Freedom Hosting II. It also hosted smaller sites dedicated to other illegal activities, including hacking and credit card fraud.
Freedom Hosting II is a successor to Freedom Hosting, another huge network hosting at least 23 paedophilic websites with names such as Lolita City. The original Freedom Hosting was taken offline in 2013 after the FBI gained access and hacked into users’ computers to reveal their identities.
Eric Eoin Marques, a US-born Irish citizen in his early thirties alleged to have run the original Freedom Hosting, is appealing against an American request to extradite him from Ireland on charges of conspiring to distribute and advertise child pornography.
Analysis of members’ personal data stored on the Freedom Hosting II server reveals thousands of UK-based users. One man in London with a previous conviction for possessing indecent images of children registered on three paedophile forums, including Paradise Village.
What is the dark net?
It has not been possible to confirm the identities of these individuals because unrelated users could have stolen or made up the email addresses. It is also impossible to tell who owned and ran Freedom Hosting II. Analysis of the hacked data suggested that the majority of its users were white men but some appeared to be women.
Data from one forum, which was available to visitors who were not using anonymising software, contained IP addresses that indicate their likely locations. About 6 per cent were in the UK, suggesting that about 10,000 Britons used the hacked child abuse sites.
Last year the NSPCC estimated that half a million men in the UK may have viewed child sex abuse images.
The NCA said that it would continue to work with international partners “to ensure individuals who pose a risk to children are held to account”.
source: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/child-abuse-network-had-10-000-uk-members-d665p2nwk
