UNITED KINGDOM
Wired
April 17, 2018
By JAMES TEMPERTON
Paedophiles have a powerful and worrying new tool to help them find images and videos of child sexual abuse: the humble website redirect. And it’s causing a major headache for those leading the global fight against abuse.
“It works in same way as advertising referrers work,” says Fred Langford, deputy CEO of the Internet Watch Foundation, a UK-based charity that last year found and removed 78,589 images or videos of child sexual abuse. For Langford and his small team, the so-called “disguised website” technique is the latest salvo in the evade and detection arms race.
Here’s how it works: when a paedophile visits a bulletin board or online forum to find images and videos of sexual abuse, they click on a link. When they do, they enter a convoluted redirection system. As they pass from redirect to redirect, they are handed session cookies that confirm the route they’ve taken. Without going down this elaborate path, the site at the end of the redirect displays legal content. But with the right session cookie, that exact same URL displays child sexual abuse content.
For paedophiles, it means images and videos stay online for longer. For law enforcement, it makes finding and removing such content significantly more difficult. “If you did a Google search and clicked on it you’d just get the legal content,” says Langford. “If you came from a bulletin board that is used by paedophiles then this system just seamlessly passes people through. It’s exactly the same page.” The IWF was the to first detect the disguised website technique and saw an 86 per cent year-on-year increase in its use in 2017. In total, the IWF found 2,909 disguised websites last year. And many more likely still evade detection. “It’s getting worse and worse,” says Langford.
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