On 16th October 2019, US DoJ announced that American law enforcement agencies in collaboration with their South Korean counterparts have shut down ‘Welcome To Video (WTV)’, the world’s largest online child pornography platform.
Aside from the WTV owner, a total of 337 members from 12 different countries were arrested, 23 children who were being physically abused were rescued and eight terabytes of pornographic material was seized.
This was undoubtedly one of the highest profile takedowns of a dark web criminal enterprise of this decade, perhaps second only to the infamous Silk Road in 2013.
But notoriety isn’t the only common denominator between the two platforms. See if you can follow me here.
- At the time of arrest, Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht was 29 years old. WTV founder, Jong Woo Son, was 23 years old.
- Ross Ulbricht was caught, among many other things, because he left clues to his identity on private chat rooms of his site, which had been infiltrated by FBI. He also used his stackoverflow username (frosty) as his SSH public encryption key (frosty@frosty) for Silk Road.
- Jong Woo Son was traced down to a large extent because his supposedly anonymous website was leaking his real IP address through the web page’s source code.
To sum it up for those of us who don’t speak nerd, these platforms were not brought down through the use of some cutting edge cyber policing technologies. They went down because their founders were men in their 20s, who made rookie mistakes owing to the fact that they had no prior experience in managing large-scale criminal enterprises, or even large scale legal enterprises for that matter.
One way to look at it, and indeed the way I personally look at it, is that we simply got lucky. But luck is not known to be a faithful partner to anyone. Sooner or later, Silk Road and WTV will get replaced by next generation of enterprises who will not repeat these blunders. Crime families and mafias that have operated for generations in physical world will eventually go digital, bolstering the threat posed by cybercrime with their decades of experience in conventional crime.
Next Silk Road or WTV may not be administered by a 23 year old who is barely out of college. In all probability it will be led by hardened crime bosses with years of experience being chased by the police. If we do not lose sleep over this eventuality now, we will wake up to a series of nasty surprises in not-so-distant future.
