April 17, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The Internet Watch Foundation (iwf.org.uk) announced on Thursday that it has released its annual report that reveals new information regarding the scale of publicly available child sexual abuse websites known to the IWF.
The IWF is a self-regulatory body, funded by the European Union and the wider online industry, and is made up of Internet service providers, mobile operators and manufacturers and content service providers. On its website it says it is the only recognized organization in the UK operating an Internet ‘Hotline’ for the public and IT professionals to report their exposure to potentially illegal content online like child sexual abuse images and racial hatred content.
According to reports by The Register, the organization says that while it is rare to trace these child abuse websites to the UK, the IWF has identified a core of 2,755 foreign-hosted abuse sites that are likely responsible for the majority of images obtained by UK pedophiles.
The positive side to this, says the IWF, is that the number of those websites has remained relatively static over the last three years and represents a concrete target that can be tackled through international partnerships. The Register says the number of websites identified by the IWF is down ten per cent on last year.
“We believe that speculative figures can create a distorted picture of the scale of the problem of child sexual abuse websites,” says Peter Robbins, CEO of the IWF. “This year we have highlighted what we believe is a manageable number worldwide of such websites, known to us. We hope that this revelation and the analysis and intelligence behind the numbers will lead to a better understanding of the issue and justify the need for more international partnerships to pool resources and thinking in order to find solutions: a coordinated global attack on these websites could get these horrific images removed from the Web and those responsible investigated.”
In its annual report, the IWF says that around 80 per cent of the 2,755 foreign-hosted websites are commercial operations, which hop from Web host to Web host to avoid detection.
The IWF says that these tactics, coupled with the complex multi-national nature of the crimes, mean that only a united global response involving law enforcement authorities, governments and the international online sector will enable effective investigation of these websites, their content and the organizations behind them.
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