Issue no. 387 - 12 May 2008

• UK - Possession of sexually violent images made a criminal offence (BBC)
  Possession of sexually violent images will now be punishable by up to three years in jail. The ban is part of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill. The bill had its final reading on Thursday where it received Royal Assent.

Issue no. 386 - 20 April 2008

• CoE - Tackling cybercrime: guidance on sharing Internet data (IHT)
  The Council of Europe settled on voluntary guidelines to strengthen cooperation between the police and Internet service companies. The guidelines - adopted at a special conference in Strasbourg of more than 200 people representing law enforcement agencies, trade groups for Internet service providers and companies ranging from Microsoft to eBay - are also a practical attempt to smooth uneasy confrontations that service providers complain are common when investigators seek information. See Octopus Interface 2008 Cooperation against Cybercrime, Tuesday 1 - Wednesday 2 April 2008, Council of Europe, Strasbourg, France. The conference adopted a set of conclusions and the guidelines for service provider - law-enforcement cooperation

Issue no. 385 - 21 March 2008

• FR - French Police extends the Internet blacklist (EDRI-gram)
  French Internal Affairs Minister,Michèle Alliot-Marie, announced new measures to fight against cybercrime, including extending the websites blacklist and pushing for computer online investigations, without the permission of the country of the hosting company. The Minister visited the Cybercrime Brigade and announced a new "best practices chart" with the operators in order to block websites. According to the statements, the Norwegian model was taken into consideration, meaning the creation of a list with websites not only with child pornography information, but also the ones with information on making explosives or chemical weapons, terrorist propaganda and racial hate speech.

Issue no. 384 - 24 February 2008

• US - Study Debunks 'Internet Predator' Stereotypes (AHN)
  Contrary to popular belief, Internet sex predators target teenagers and not young kids, cites a new study. Also, a majority of Internet sex predators are not adults who pose as another youth to victimize children by enticing them to meet then abducting or forcibly raping them. Only 5 percent of online offenders pretended to be teenagers. The study, which was based on three surveys, revealed that Internet sex offenders rarely use force but instead gain the trust and confidence of their victims before seducing them into sexual relationships. The victims of these predators are mostly teenagers who mistake the attention for love. According to the researchers, young people who were most vulnerable to online sex offenders had histories of sexual or physical abuse, family problems, and are adventurous on the Internet or have most likely talked online about sex. The study, 'Online Predators and Their Victims: Myths, Realities, and Implications for Prevention and Treatment' was conducted by Janis Wolak, JD, David Finkelhor, PhD, Kimberly Mitchell, PhD and Michele Ybarra, PhD, at the Crimes against Children Research Center, University of New Hampshire and published in the American Psychologist.

Issue no. 382 - 6 January 2008

• Boom times for hi-tech criminals (BBC)
  Starting a career as a cyber criminal got much easier in 2007. So say security experts looking back on 12 months in which hi-tech gangs took control of the net's underground. The economy supporting these groups has matured so much that now everything from virus-writing kits to spam-spewing zombies are available for rent or hire.

Issue no. 381 - 8 December 2007

• EU - Member States implement EU legislation to combat the sexual exploitation of children and child pornography (RAPID)
  The European Commission has approved the report on the implementation by Member States of the Council Framework Decision 2004/68/JHA of 22 December 2003 on combating the sexual exploitation of children and child pornography. This report finds that most Member States have criminalised sexual exploitation, sexual abuse and child pornography on the Internet, But Member States can still do more. See also REPORT from the Commission on the implementation of the COUNCIL FRAMEWORK DECISION on combating the sexual exploitation of children and child pornography.

• Hackers hijack web search results (BBC)
  A huge campaign to poison web searches and trick people into visiting malicious websites has been thwarted. The booby-trapped websites came up in search results for search terms such as "Christmas gifts" and "hospice". Windows users falling for the trick risked having their machine hijacked and personal information plundered. The criminals poisoned search results using thousands of domains set up to convince search index software they were serious sources of information.

• Interpol in rare sex abuse appeal (BBC)
  Interpol has launched an unprecedented global public appeal to help identify a man shown sexually abusing children in photographs posted on the internet. The man appears in about 200 images depicting the abuse of 12 boys, which police said were taken in Vietnam and Cambodia, possibly in 2002 and 2003. The pictures had been digitally altered but police computer specialists have produced identifiable images. Interpol says the man is a danger to children while he remains at large. See also Thai police name suspected web paedophile (Guardian ) and Thais arrest paedophile suspect (BBC).

• Latin America: New 'Cyber Paradise' for Paedophiles and Racists? (IPS)
  The crackdown in eastern Europe and the United States on websites posting racist content or child pornography could expose Latin America to the risk of becoming a new "cyber paradise" for on-line paedophilia and racism, experts say. The warning was sounded at the United Nations-sponsored Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Rio de Janeiro, which has been discussing issues like security, access and diversity on the net. Many of the websites bearing illegal and harmful content were hosted by the Czech Republic. But after the clampdown they migrated to countries like Panama, according to Thiago Tavares, head of the non-governmental organisation (NGO) SaferNet Brasil.

• NZ - Arrests made in botnet crackdown (BBC)
  Police in New Zealand have questioned a teenager believed to be the ringleader of an international cyber-crime group. The group is alleged to have infiltrated more than one million computers and skimmed millions of dollars from people's bank accounts. The teenager, who is 18, cannot be named for legal reasons but was known by an alias as "Akill". He was detained as part of an FBI crackdown on hi-tech criminals who run botnets - networks of hijacked PCs.

Issue no. 380 - 30 September 2007

• CZ - Czech Bill On Child Porn Faces Resistance (Washington Post)
  When Austrian authorities announced that they had uncovered an online child pornography ring, pedophiles around the world suddenly became potential targets of criminal investigations - but not the ring's 63 customers in the Czech Republic, where downloading and possessing such images is not a crime. Creating and selling child pornography is illegal in the Czech Republic. But the law does not extend to people who obtain it. Despite repeated calls for legislation in the nearly 20 years since communism's demise, this country of 10.2 million people remains the most prominent haven for consumers of child pornography in the 27-member European Union. Slovenia, a tiny Balkan nation of 2 million people, is the only other E.U. country not to have outlawed possession of the material, according to an Interpol Web site that summarizes national laws.

• UK - Police break into peer-to-peer paedophile chat-room (Guardian)
  Timothy Cox was a quiet, clean-cut 27-year-old who worked for his small family brewery in rural Suffolk. He was also 'the son of god' - the mastermind of a global paedophile ring.

• US - Defense Lawyers Cringe at MediaDefender's Child-Porn Patrol Plans (Wired)
  New York state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is raising the eyebrows of defense attorneys over his recently exposed plans to pay the controversial anti-piracy firm MediaDefender to gather evidence for child-porn prosecutions.

• US / UK - IWF intelligence leads to rescue and arrest (Press Release)
  IWF intelligence lead to rescue of three prepubescent children being sexually abused and their abuser being sentenced to 60 years in prison. The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) provided intelligence to Cybertipline, its sister Hotline in the US, regarding a website which appeared to be hosted in the US and contained images of children being sexually abused.

Issue no. 379 - 2 September 2007

• G-8 - Ministers' Declaration: Reinforcing the International Fight Against Child Pornography (G-8 Justice and Home Affairs Ministers)
  May 24th, 2007 Child pornography grievously harms all children: it harms the child who is sexually assaulted in the making of the image; the same child is re-victimized every time that image is viewed; and it harms all children because it portrays them as a class of objects for sexual exploitation. We categorically denounce those who sexually exploit children by producing images of their sexual abuse and by distributing or collecting such images. Because no child should be victimized in this horrific way, today we pledge to redouble our efforts to enforce the international fight against child pornography.

• UK - Briton held over wireless broadband 'theft' (Reuters)
  A 39-year-old Briton has been arrested on suspicion of using someone else's wireless Internet connection without permission, police said on Wednesday. Officers spotted the man using a laptop as he sat on a wall outside a house in Chiswick, West London. He told officers he had browsed the Internet via an unsecured broadband link from a nearby house, Scotland Yard said. He was arrested and later released on police bail to November 11 pending further inquiries. See also Police: Wi-Fi arrest not part of a crackdown (ZDNet UK).

• UK - Government 'must act on e-crime' (RAPID)
  The government must do more to protect internet users from the threat of e-crime, says a House of Lords report. The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee said the internet was now "the playground of criminals". The report criticised the government's current "Wild West" approach of leaving internet security up to the individual as "inefficient and unrealistic". See Personal Internet Security. Witnesses from the European Commission, including Commissioner Viviane Reding, gave evidence: see Vol II - Evidence.

Issue no. 378 - 5 August 2007

• CoE- A new Council of Europe Convention to protect children against sexual exploitation and abuse (Press Release)
  The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe has adopted the Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse, which represents a major advance in this field. This new Convention is the first instrument to establish the various forms of sexual abuse of children as criminal offences, including such abuse committed in the home or family, with the use of force, coercion or threats. In addition to the offences traditionally committed in this field - sexual abuse, child prostitution, child pornography, children's forced participation in pornographic performances - the text also addresses the issue of "grooming" of children for sexual purposes and "sex tourism". The Convention will be opened for signature at the Conference of European Ministers of Justice in Lanzarote on 25 and 26 October this year. See The full text of the Convention and the explanatory report.

• MySpace deletes 29,000 sex offenders (Reuters)
  Popular Internet social network MySpace has detected and deleted 29,000 convicted sex offenders on its service, more than four times the figure it had initially reported. The company, owned by media conglomerate News Corp., said in May it had deleted about 7,000 user profiles that belonged to convicted offenders. MySpace attracts about 60 million unique visitors monthly in the United States.

• US - Democrats to push new Net sex-predator laws (CNET News.com)
  Expect a new push in Congress this fall for laws aimed at keeping sexual predators off the likes of MySpace.com and elevating fines on Internet service providers that don't report child pornography.

• US - New Scrutiny for Facebook Over Predators (New York Times)
  Facebook, the online social network, has stolen some of MySpace's momentum with users and the news media. Now, it is being subjected to the same accusations that it does not do enough to keep sexual predators off its site. Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut's attorney general, said that investigators in his state were looking into "three or more" cases of convicted sex offenders who had registered on Facebook and had "also found inappropriate images and content" on the service. The inquiry continues, he said, and state officials have contacted Facebook and asked it to remove the profiles.

Issue no. 377 - 5 July 2007

• UK - New law will criminalise possession of extreme porn (OUT-LAW.com)
  The Government has published a new law which will criminalise extreme pornography. The possession of extreme pornography will be punishable by up to three years in jail. Material covered will include necrophilia, bestiality and violence that is life threatening or likely to result in serious injury to the anus, breasts or genitals. Such material has been illegal to publish until now under the Obscene Publications Act. The material has not been illegal to view or possess, though; the new law will make possession a crime. Images of child pornography are already illegal to view or to possess.

• UK - The shambles over cybercrime (Guardian)
  The National High Tech Crime Unit, set up in April 2001 in response to a perception that e-crime was on the rise, was absorbed a year ago into the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (Soca). Soca took over this role because it was felt that financial e-crime was increasingly the preserve of organised crime, its principal area of responsibility. But the result, say people in both the banking and computer security industries, is a shambles.

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