THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Paedophiles are using rogue techies to promote child pornography on social media, said Thiruvananthapuram range IG and Cyberdome nodal officer Manoj Abraham.
Perpetrators were found to be using heavily encrypted messaging app Telegram for promoting such offensive content. “The recent findings by Cyberdome found that many youngsters who are technologically brilliant had been used for promoting such groups,” Abraham said.
Last week, the Cyberdome had tracked down a few groups such as ‘Poompatta’, ‘Nadan Thundu’ and ‘Awesome Kerala’ from Telegram and the police have nabbed the administrator of one such group from Malappuram. On interrogation, he had revealed that many techies who are ‘loners’ were being used for promoting such groups. The Cyberdome found that more than 1,000 members from India and abroad are active in many such groups.
“Though they are technically brilliant and active in the virtual world, they are found to be introverts in real life. So, such mafia are targeting them as a tool to operate,” Abraham said. “As Telegram is a highly secure media, these youngsters understand the security features much better than the common user. Even the cyber police team could not decrypt the content on Telegram. The techies are using it very smartly to evade police surveillance.”He pointed out that the ‘P-HUNT-17.01’ operation, which targeted groups sharing child porn on Telegram, had adopted a social engineering method for tracking users.
Social engineering is a psychological method used by developers to discover the real identities of the group members by checking their profiles in other social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter. The Cyberdome will continue the operation to verify the users who promote and share child pornographic images and videos.