Website of rural shop unwittingly hosted child pornography

THE WEBSITE of a family-owned specialist clothes shop in rural Ireland ended up unwittingly hosting child pornography put there by international criminals based in Ukraine, it was revealed yesterday.

The owners of the shop did not know about it until they received a visit from gardaí who had been alerted to the website by an international hotline set up to monitor internet child pornography.

The case from October last year is the first of its kind in Ireland where an Irish website was found to have been hosting child pornography, according to the Internet Service Providers Association of Ireland’s Hotline.ie, a service which was set up 11 years ago to allow the public report on illegal websites, particularly child pornography.

The shop owners had contracted the website out to another company that designs them and that company had not put the proper internet security provisions in place.

The incident occurred when the UK-based INHOPE Hotline alerted gardaí after a tip-off from a member of the public who pointed out that a forum had an advertisement for child pornography which eventually accessed the clothing shop website in Ireland.

Hotline manager Paul Durrant said the shop owners, who have not been identified, were “absolutely horrified” to be associated with child pornography.

However, they were not held responsible by gardaí, and the pornography was taken down just five hours after it was first reported.

“Gardaí could see from the footprints that this IP address, which is the unique computer address, uploaded this folder at a certain date and time. They traced that to Ukraine.”

Mr Durrant said the case illustrated the importance of maintaining websites and having the most up-to-date security features.

Hotline found that the number of illegal websites which were reported to its service has almost halved in just two years from 536 in 2008 to 284 in 2009.

Of those, 274 were child pornography websites, six were financial scams, two promoted violence, one was drug-related and one promoted child grooming activities.

Mr Durrant said the decline reflected the success that authorities were having worldwide in clamping down on purveyors of child pornography on the internet, especially in Russia where a major criminal gang was broken up.

However, he warned that many child pornography rings were now resorting to peer-to-peer networks which are harder to monitor.

Minister for Justice and Law Reform Dermot Ahern praised the Garda and Hotline.ie for acting so quickly in removing the child pornography content from the host website in Ireland.

The fact that people are encountering fewer illegal websites may mark a “turning point” in worldwide efforts to counter child abuse images on the internet.