Posted on 07/06/2017 4:16:22 PM PDT by TigerClaws
German police have busted a child sex abuse site on the dark web where images and videos were exchanged.
The secret Elysium website had 87,000 members and was launched on the internet in December, prosecutors say.
The suspected ringleader, a 39-year-old man, was arrested in the state of Hesse. The forum was also used to make appointments to abuse children.
Police seized the website's server. They found that toddlers were among the children sexually abused, reports say.
The chief suspect was arrested at his home in the Limburg-Weilburg area north of Frankfurt on 12 June.
He has been linked not only to spreading videos and images of child sex abuse but is also suspected of carrying out acts of serious sexual abuse.
What is the dark web?
Several suspected users of the site have been arrested in Germany and Austria.
Three were held in Germany and another 14 were detained in Austria, according to local reports. Prosecutors were due to give further details on Friday.
The website only appeared on the dark web at the end of last year but attracted tens of thousands in a matter of months.
Sites on the dark web are not visible through normal search engines, and while there are many legitimate uses for it, it has become a magnet for online criminal activity. Related
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Guessing this sad story is about relatives or neighbors. And it steams me to think how easy it could be for someone caught up in the devil’s pitiless ruthlessness. Dominos.
And as ironic as it might sound to the rugged individualist breed of conservative, part of an answer is to let the Lord restore our hearts to caring. We never know when our lives may touch some hurting child or older erring sinner to the good, heading off a satanic incursion.
I think the term secret places is a bit of a misnomer. I've had servers from various times that I used for my own purposes, such as being essentially an anonymous FTP site that didn't have actual DNS names, so you have to know the IP to get to them. It's not really 'secret' as such, but is more 'security through obscurity' than anything else. Much of the 'dark web' is like that. You get to a system by IP rather than name. Trouble with that though, is that anyone can scan IP address ranges looking for web servers, and plenty of people do, as I can tell from my access logs. Because of the way the internet is designed, it's difficult to actually hide, though you can do things like use non-standard ports which will keep you off the radar for the most part, but even that doesn't help against portscanners. To really hide, you need 'port knockers', but only the more sophisticated can get away with that, because it really does make it difficult to connect to without specific scripts to do so.
All of the above being said, it is fairly easy to hide under the radar for some values of 'hiding'. Anything you want to have external folk connect to though, isn't really going to be able to get very stealthy, just because of the way things work.
It will be interesting to see if the widespread implementation of IPv6 will make things 'better' from a hiding standpoint. There will certainly be a lot more address space to scan. Of course, I'm not really holding my breath for what I'd consider to be widespread implementation of IPv6.
We use IPv6 at the University but we also have Internet 2. There’s a lot to be said for downloading Linux distros in just a few minutes.
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