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‘Web spiders’ hunt down abuse images
By Sean O'neill
The fight against the growth of online child abuse images is about to be transformed by a cyberweapon that scours the web for illegal material and demands its rapid removal. Project Arachnid has released an army of “web spiders” that crawl across the internet tracking down abuse images, identifying the company hosting them and sending immediate take-down notices. In a six-week trial by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, Arachnid processed 230 million pages, located 5.1 million with paedophile material and identified 40,000 unique abuse images. The Internet Watch Foundation, Britain’s trace and removal centre, says it assesses about 1,000 URLs, or web addresses, every week. Lianna McDonald, chief executive of the Canadian centre, said early feedback from North America indicated that more than 90 per cent of images were being taken down within 48 hours of the removal notice being served. She described the number of child abuse images being located as a “reality check”. The data harvested by the spiders, from both the open web and the so-called dark web, which is not accessible to standard web search engines, can be shared with law enforcement agencies around the world in seconds. Interpol is supporting the project and Canadian officials will visit Britain soon to share the technology with child protection bodies. John Carr, secretary of the UK Children’s Charities Coalition on Internet Safety, said: “This has the potential to be a gamechanger. The Canadians have taken this to a whole new level and the early results are completely mind-blowing. There has never been anything like it before and Arachnid can work with equal facility on the dark web and the open web.” The NSPCC said that Arachnid was “potentially a gigantic step in helping young people have these horrific images removed”. Arachnid draws on a database of digital fingerprints of known abuse images and sets out to find them much more quickly than existing methods. In a further development, it has taken the digital signature of images from a recent crime scene and is aiming to intercept them before they can be shared by online offenders. Ms McDonald said: “We are never going to arrest our way out of the problem so we set out to choke off the supply. The consistent message we have had from survivors is that they are haunted by the idea these images are online and what they want most is their removal.” While acknowledging the huge benefits of the project, Mr Carr warned that no criminal justice system in the world would have the capacity to handle the scale of offending which was being revealed. He said: “Is there a police force anywhere in the world ready to deal with a potentially gigantic increase in new information about web pages with child abuse images? “Almost certainly not, but if Arachnid leads to more images being removed more swiftly that has to be a good thing.” Mick Moran, Interpol’s lead director for online child exploitation, said that Arachnid would help “map the true scale of the problem around the world” and lead to more children being rescued. There is no reliable estimate of the number of child abuse images on the internet but agencies report their rapid spread and say the children in the material are becoming younger. British police have said that as many as 100,000 people in the UK were viewing online paedophile material. The Internet Watch Foundation said last April that there was a 417 per cent rise in the number of reported URL’s containing sexual abuse images and videos since 2013. Illegal child abuse imagery had also increased 118 per cent since 2014. A total of 5,236 URLs suspected of commercial child sexual exploitation were reported in 2013, according to figures from the European Coalition Against Sexual Exploitation of Children Online (EFC). The organisation said that the number of websites has been growing over the past three years.
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