There has been a sharp rise in paedophiles and organised criminals hiding child abuse images on apparently legal commercial adult pornography websites, the Internet Watch Foundation has warned.
In the past year the number of such disguised websites, which provide a secret route to child sexual abuse content, had risen by 86%, said Fred Langford, the chief executive of the UK charity. The IWF uncovered 2,909 such websites in 2017, compared with 1,572 in 2016.
Langford said the technique of hiding illegal content, which involves using a shortened URL that directs the user through a back door to child abuse images and videos, has become increasingly popular with criminals because some international police forces and internet watchdogs still did not know how to identify such sites or take them down.
“The content is remaining live for longer, which is driving their popularity,” he said.
The warning comes as the charity revealed that it had removed a third more child abuse images and videos from the internet in the past year.
Langford said the vast majority of disguised websites were deliberately operated by the website owner, with only a few cases of legitimate sites being hacked.
He said there was a risk that people searching for adult pornography or other legal content could accidentally view child abuse images content on disguised sites.
“On occasions we do see spam referrals on online forums,” said Langford. “It only takes one click for the curious and before you know it they’ve not only incriminated themselves but also viewed the illegal content. If the URL has found its way on to a police database you could end up in a tricky situation.”
The IWF said 78,589 reports of suspect online content were positively identified as containing illegal child sexual abuse imagery in 2017 and taken down.
This was a 37% increase in confirmed reports from the previous year when there were 57,335 confirmed reports of illegal content, according to the charity’s annual report, published on Wednesday.
The report found that 57% of victims were assessed to be aged 10 or younger, including 2% believed to be aged two or under. A third of the images were designated to be of the most serious category A, meaning they involved the rape or sexual torture of children.
