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 sharing website. The "manager" was hidden - but not very well - on the Deep Web and 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:
"Using the same technological expertise he used as Deputy Director of Cyber Security at HHS, DeFoggi attempted to exploit sexual children and distribute child pornography through an anonymous computer network."
In August, it was revealed that the FBI had installed a drive-by spyware to detect child abuse traffickers hiding behind the anonymous Tor network.
The service did not violate only a forum with images of child abuse that was hidden in Tor, but then trapped and 3 other spyware websites.
The operation began with an investigation in the Netherlands in August 2011, when the national police began an investigation to crack down on child abuse. Dutch authorities developed a web crawler that roamed the Deep Web – which is the part of World Wide Web which 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 trace their owners and the locations of servers hosting quite easily. In the Deep Web, however, these details are hidden beneath the layers of anonymity 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 Department of Justice (DOJ), users of the website tipped each other off on how to avoid detection by authorities, gave tips για τη σωστή χρήση του λογισμικού κρυπτογράφησης, τεχνικές για να κρύψουν ή να προστατέψουν με κωδικό πρόσβασης συλλογές με παιδικές εικόνες, και προγράμματα για την απόλυτη deletion data from a computer.
Besides exchanging images of child abuse, DeFoggi is also accused of raping and killing children.
