Timothy DeFoggi: The former director of cybersecurity for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison for his activities on a child abuse image-sharing website. The “director” was hidden – but not very well – on the Deep Web and accessed through the anonymous Tor network.
Timothy DeFoggi, 56, was convicted on August 26, 2014, after a four-day jury trial in the state of Nebraska.
The charges against him: participation in a child exploitation enterprise, conspiracy to advertise and disseminate child pornography, and access to a computer for the purpose of displaying child pornography.
In a publication by the Department of Justice, Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell states that DeFoggi used the same technological skills that HHS used to carry out his crimes:
“Using the same technological expertise he used as Deputy Director of Cyber Security at HHS, DeFoggi attempted to sexually exploit children and distribute child pornography through an anonymous computer network.”
In August, it was revealed that the FBI had installed a drive-by spyware to track child sex traffickers hiding behind the anonymous Tor network.
The service not only compromised a forum with child abuse images hidden in Tor, but then also trapped 3 other websites with spyware.
The operation began with an investigation in the Netherlands in August 2011, when the national police launched an investigation into child abuse. Dutch authorities developed a web crawler that scoured the Deep Web – the part of the World Wide Web that is not indexed by conventional search engines.
They were thus able to methodically check several hidden addresses, which made it easier for them to discover which websites were designed to publish and distribute child abuse images.
If these websites were hosted on the World Wide Web, then the story would end there: the FBI could track down their owners and the locations of the hosting servers quite easily. But on the Deep Web, these details are hidden under the layers of anonymization of routing through the Tor network.
But one of the sites, “Pedoboard,” had an impermissible security flaw: an administrator account without a password.
The FBI discovered the open door and, while searching, found enough evidence about the site's true location. This led them to arrest its owner, Aaron McGrath, in November 2012.
Instead of shutting down the servers, the FBI left them running for three weeks along with a spyware they installed.
So during the investigation, the FBI identified another 25 Tor users on child sexual abuse image websites, from all states.
According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), users of the website informed each other about how to avoid detection by authorities, gave advice on the proper use of encryption software, techniques for hiding or password-protecting collections of child images, and programs for completely deleting data from a computer.
Beyond sharing child abuse images, DeFoggi is also accused of raping and murdering children.
