Timothy DeFoggi: The former director of cybersecurity for the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has been sentenced to 25 years in federal prison for his activities on a child abuse image sharing website. Mr. "director" was hidden - but not particularly well - in the Deep Web and he had access through the anonymous Tor network.
Ο Timothy DeFoggi, 56 of years, was sentenced to 26 on August 2014 after a four-day jury trial in Nebraska.
The accusations against him: participation in a child exploitation business, conspiracy to advertise and disseminate child pornography, and access to a computer to promote child pornography.
In a publication of Ministry of Justice, US Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell reports that DeFoggi used the same technological skills that HHS used to carry out his crimes:
“Χρησιμοποιώντας την ίδια τεχνολογική εξειδίκευση που χρησιμοποιούσε ως Αναπληρωτής Διευθυντής του τμήματος Cyber Security στο HHS, ο DeFoggi επιχείρησε να εκμεταλλευτεί σεξουαλικά children και να κυκλοφορήσει παιδική πορνογραφία μέσω ενός ανώνυμου δικτύου ηλεκτρονικών computers. "
In August, it was revealed that the FBI had installed drive-by spyware to track down child abuse traffickers hiding behind the anonymous network Gate.
Η service not only did it hack a forum with child abuse images hidden in Tor, but it also infected 3 other websites with spyware.
The business started with a survey in the Netherlands in August of 2011 when the National Police began a survey to combat child abuse. The Dutch authorities have developed a web crawler trapping the Deep Web - the part of the World Wide Web that is not indexed by conventional search engines.
They thus managed to methodically check several hidden addresses, which made it easier for them to find out which websites were created for publishing and distributing images of child abuse.
If these websites were hosted on the World Wide Web, then the story would end there: the FBI could locate their owners and host server sites quite easily. In the Deep Web, however, these details are hidden under the anonymous layers of routing through the Tor network.
But one of the sites, Pedoboard, had an unsafe security loophole. An administrator account without a password.
The FBI discovered the open door and looking for it, they found enough evidence about the actual location of the site. So they managed to capture his owner, Aaron McGrath, in November of 2012.
The FBI, instead of shutting down the servers, let them run for three weeks along with a spyware they installed.
So during the investigation, the FBI detected other 25 Tor users on child sexual abuse images pages from all nations.
According to the DOJ, users of the site informed each other of how to avoid identifying them by authorities, advising on the proper use of encryption software, techniques to hide or protect by password collections with child images, and programs to completely delete data from a computer.
Besides exchanging images of child abuse, DeFoggi is also accused of raping and killing children.
