Europol announced arrests in several countries around the world, after busting a child pornography group that shared lewd images and multimedia files through TOR and secret, closed groups via Skype.
According to the Spanish National Police report:
"The agents of the Central Cybercrime Unit of the National Police, within the framework of their cyber-patrol tasks, detected a link in the TOR network in which they were invited to participate in different chat rooms to exchange files of pedophile content. As a result of the intense police work carried out, several invitation links were identified, open to all users, which gave access to resident groups in a VOiP communication service. The researchers were able to verify that their members exchanged all kinds of content related to child sexual exploitation, facilitating through these channels of all types of multimedia files, including in many of them download links to the cloud service that housed them."
Cyber investigators say they developed an "innovative operational protocol" (they did not share details) to infiltrate this group. And they also coordinated among countries to make sure evidence was not destroyed or degraded once arrests began.
Europol says eight people were arrested across France, Hungary, Italy, Spain, and Canada.
The dark web truly is just that. Dark.
