2013 SAW THE single highest number of child porn cases traced back to Irish servers, a new report has revealed.

Hotline.ie, a website founded by the Internet Service Providers Association of Ireland, today released their 2013 report that showed that up to 2009, there had been no cases of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) traced back to Ireland.

In the four years from 2009-2012 Hotline.ie recorded 11 cases of CSAM. However, in 2013 alone there were seven cases, the highest number so far in one year.

Five out of the seven cases traced to Ireland in 2013 were cloud related.

These cases of abuse affected one operator’s cloud servers here which are managed from the USA. While not a member of ISPAI, Hotline.ie took action and succeeded, in cooperation with law enforcement agencies, to have the content removed from the internet.

Hotline says that with the advent of Cloud services and the fact that these straddle jurisdictions, not just adjacent countries, the situation is becoming ever more complex.

Even so, they say, Ireland has an “excellent record” in comparison to most other developed European countries.

According to Paul Durrant, CEO of ISPAI and manager of Hotline.ie, another trend identified thorough analysis of the assessments conducted by Hotline.ie is that “paedophiles are constantly trying to find new ways to avoid detection”.

We are concerned that peer-to-peer services are increasingly being abused and I would like to use the opportunity to appeal to those using these services in a legitimate way to report, using the anonymous Hotline.ie service, if they encounter filenames suggesting or referring to images or videos of CSAM.

Throughout 2013, Hotline.ie assessed as CSAM, under Irish Law, 128 Cases which were traced and forwarded to the appropriate jurisdiction for action. The top 3 countries to which Hotline.ie forwarded CSAM reports for action and investigation were the USA (48), the Netherlands (18) and Russia (16).

Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald said that the results were ‘heartbreaking’, and called on the public be vigilant.

“It is heartbreaking to note that children in all categories are at risk in this vile online trade.

“On the positive side, it would seem from the report that Irish people are less likely to stumble across illegal material than they were in the past.

“On the negative side, this may mean that those who provide and those who seek out such material are getting better at concealing it.”

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