![]() Having never faced a situation like this, my primary concern was to ensure I was on the right moral, ethical and legal side of things. We agreed to speak on background, from reporter to reporter. I spoke with a well-known journalist to ask for ethical advice. Nor can one dismiss the idea of a child abuse site continuing to operate on the dark web. A journalist cannot idly stand by knowing there could be a car bomb sitting outside a building, ready to detonate. Risk to life and child exploitation are top of the list. But while journalists are told to report and observe and not get involved, there are exceptions. As a cybersecurity and national security reporter, the government all too often is “the nemesis,” often a target of journalistic inquisitions and investigations. One thing the lawyers couldn’t tell me is if I should report the findings to the government. While journalists have a lot of flexibility and freedoms, this was not one of them.Īfter a call with several CBS lawyers, we decided that there was no legal way to write the story without verifying the site’s contents, something we legally weren’t able to do. Only federal agents working an investigation are allowed to access sites that contain illegal content. But we could not access the site for any reason - even for journalistic reasons and in a controlled environment - for fear that the site may display child abuse imagery. The hackers gave me a username and password for the site, which they said they had created just for me to verify their claims. and foreign law enforcement to prosecute this case and recover funds for victims.” “Children around the world are safer because of the actions taken by U.S. ![]() A primary concern was that the dark web site was already under federal investigation, and writing about it could jeopardize that effort.īut we also faced another headache: There was no legal way we could access the site to verify it was what the hackers claimed. My then editor-in-chief and I discussed how we could approach the story. If proven true, the hackers would have made a major breakthrough in not only discovering a major dark web child abuse site, but could potentially identify the owners - and the visitors to the site. The hackers boasted about how they siphoned off the list as users logged in, without the users’ knowledge, and had more than a hundred thousand more - but they would not share them. They also provided me with a text file containing a sample of a thousand IP addresses of individuals who they said had logged in to the site. The group claimed it broke into the dark web site, which it said was titled “Welcome to Video,” and identified four real-world IP addresses of the site, said to be different servers running this supposedly massive child abuse site. I had previous interactions with the hacker group, but nothing like this. A hacker group reached out to me over an encrypted chat claiming to have broken into a dark web site running a massive child sexual exploitation operation. In November 2017, I was working for CBS as the security editor at ZDNet. This morning, the Justice Department announced that it had brought charges against the administrator and hundreds of users of the “world’s largest” child sexual exploitation marketplace on the dark web.įor me, it marked the end of a story I’ve wanted to write for two years.
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