Innocent websites hacked to share child abuse images

The Internet Watch Foundation has warned that legitimate, innocent websites are being hacked to serve images of child sex abuse. The charity has announced that in the last six weeks they have received 227 reports of internet users being directed from completely legal porn sites to web pages hosted on another server. This websites are sharing illegal, abusive material.

According to the report, users visiting legitimate adult porn sites are being redirected to other businesses with folders of child abuse images. With the recent clamp down on pornography by UK prime minister David Cameron this could cause many issues for businesses unknowingly storing images such as this.

Sarah Smith, the foundations technical researcher said in a statement “We hadn’t seen significant numbers of hacked websites for around two years, and then suddenly in June we started seeing this happening more and more. It shows how someone, not looking for child sexual abuse images, can stumble across it. The original adult content the internet user is viewing is far removed from anything related to young people or children.”

The charity are a hotline for reports of child abuse online and they have said that some of the images they have seen are some of the worst of its kind and the people who have viewed it have been very distressed.

The administrators of the legal porn site and the owners of the hacked business websites have known that the folders of abusive material have been created, shared and linked to.

Smith added “Our reporters have been extremely diligent in explaining exactly what happened, enabling our analysts to re-trace their steps and take action against the child sexual abuse images. Since identifying this trend we’ve been tracking it and feeding into police forces and our sister hotlines abroad.”

The foundation have been able to get all the images removed to this point.

Kitguru says: This seems to be a growing problem in 2013.

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