Based on a user's personal reference to a blog we have learned that today the Ministry of Justice announced that it has brought charges against the administrator and hundreds of users of the world's largest child sexual exploitation (child pornography) site.
In November 2017, when the user was working for a news site, a group of hackers contacted him to tell him that they had broken into the dark web a mass business child sexual exploitation, which was called "Welcome to Video". The hackers they also discovered thousands IP people who had indicated that they had logged in to the website.
He goes on to point out that at the time he had talked to his editor-in-chief to try to approach this story in some way, but because the case was under federal investigation, they didn't want to jeopardize that effort.
Another problem that also existed was that there was no legal way to access the website to verify that it was what the hackers claimed.
The hackers gave him a username and password so that he could log in and verify what they told him. But he still couldn't get in as the website there was a chance it would display child pornography images, and only federal agents were allowed to access illegal content. While journalists had a lot of flexibility and freedoms, this was not one of them.
After a call he had with several lawyers, he decided there was no legal way to write the Story child pornography without verifying the contents of the website.
The story was dead, but the website was not.
So the decision he made was to report the story to the government, which was a very strange thing for a journalist to do with national security, as they often come up against each other. But an event like this, which has to do with child exploitation, comes on top of everything.
He contacted the FBI and spoke to a special agent. They agreed to send him the Addresses IPs that were on the dark web and contained the list of thousands of users.
But then, although weeks passed, there was no progress, not even from federal agents.
The hackers themselves gave him some analysis on the IP locations. He discovered that there were users from the Army Intelligence Services of USA, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Apple, of Microsoft, of Google, Samsung and many universities around the world. However, it could not identify specific individuals.
After about two years he finally had an answer. Through the US Attorney's Office, they confirmed that the website had about 250,000 photos and videos of children who had been sexually abused. Η Government described the site as the largest child pornography site.
This morning, after there were new data on the removal of the website, received the documents published on the Ministry of Justice website and found a screenshot of the website with the full address.
In total, there were 337 arrests, including a former special agent for global security and a border patrol officer. The authorities rescued 23 abused children.
It was a race from which he eventually emerged victorious, even after a long time.
