This page is maintained by Matti Nikki <muzzy@iki.fi>, with intent to participate in discussion of child porn filtering on the internet and the problems related to it. This article is also available in Finnish language: "Pelastakaa Lapset ry:n osallisuus lapsipornon levityksessä"
This document describes my findings as I researched a recent malware distribution issue with Save the Children Finland's website. Trying to find what had triggered Google's malware blacklisting for the site, I instead found evidence from Google's cache of a large amount of child porn links that had been on the site in August-September of 2009.
While the Internet is a flourishing place for the sale of child porn, it's also an extremely hostile environment. One of the greatest problems the seller of child porn has to overcome is to reach new customers. In addition to e-mail, spam is often used for marketing on various forums, practically any site where you can send a message where it stays for long enough to reach even one potential customer.
The usual targets are forums, blogs and guestbooks. One such site has been the Save the Childen Finland's web magazine where readers have been able to leave comments to some articles. Even though the messages seem to have stayed for quite long on the site (considering Google has indexed them for two months), usually spam like this is removed with haste and the sites linked end up investigated as well. Since it's not completely free to set up child porn sites, direct links to commercial child porn sites aren't usually spammed directly as-is on the temporary distribution forums. The idea is to link to as many other similar forums, in addition to a smaller number of links to more stable sites under distributor's control. After clicking through enough links, the customer will eventually find the actual child porn sales material no matter which forum he or she starts browsing from. Due to this, the real sales sites take a little longer to end up reported to authorities, mostly because majority of innocent web surfers do not go clicking through the links to find the actual sales site to be reported. As a matter of fact, searching for the actual child porn site amongst the spam links can actually be illegal in some countries, regardless of intentions of the user. Ultimately the authorities will end up mostly targeting the worthless and temporary part of the sales network.
It's not an issue for the seller if part of the forums have been taken down or placed on blocklists when the customer goes through the links, as long as at least one of the links functions and takes the customer forward. Eventually the user will find one of the many sales websites which sell access to a wider variety of material in addition to providing free sample images. After paying, the customer is provided yet another address, a secret one, which takes him/her to a private members only child porn site whose addresses rarely leak to the authorities. Some of these private sites track users based on their IP address and block access if the address changes, indicating that the login information has been passed to a third party such as law enforcement. In this case, the site won't display any illegal material at all. The hidden parts of commercial child porn sites can stay operational at the same address for years, since the police only finds out about them from actual paying customers. The arrangement is fault resilient and favorable to the illegal material vendor.
A comments section of an article on Save the Children Finland's web magazine was apparently used for child porn distribution for at least two months. Based on Google's cache, this can be confirmed to have been true for at least from August to September in 2009. During this time, readers of the magazine's therapist Lila Tuisku could have found child porn by clicking through links that appeared in comments section of one of her columns. The links were in an older column from 2008, so apparently the administration from Save the Children Finland had neglected to monitor comments written to these older articles.
When an organization like Save the Children Finland becomes involuntarily involved in distribution of child porn, it goes to demonstrate how difficult it is to fight discoverability of child porn by restricting communications on the Internet. Other spam victims were discussion forums for open source projects, forums set up by some universities, even a bunch of governments have had forums they've maintained temporarily turned into child porn distribution platforms.
The use of access blocking to restrict this type of marketing is extremely difficult, because you'll always affect legitimate sites as collateral damage as well. For example there was a small scandal in Finland when the police blocked a memorial page for the princess of Thailand as child porn when a whole Internet service provider was placed on the blocklist. Due to the ruckus the blocking was quickly reverted as the illegal images in question had been taken down, but at the same time new ones had been already posted on a free forum on the same server.
Below, a simplified graph to illustrate the linking of child porn.
And screenshot of Google image search results with some dates visible, pelastakaalapset.fi is the Save the Children Finland's official web site.
