A darknet forum used by thousands to view and share Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) was busted by the Hungarian police on May 5th.

Europol and Interpol have helped to identify the Hungarian head of the criminal organization, who operated the internationally known forum on the darknet from a server in his apartment in Hungary. The forum had thousands of users from Hungary and abroad. Members of the forum have shared an enormous number of recordings of sexual exploitation of children.

“Internet Hotline have been in cooperation with the National Investigation Bureau for roughly a decade. We are thrilled that this darknet forum has been taken down and investigators can focus on getting the children identified in the images to safety.” – Internet Hotline Analyst

Currently, users of the forum are being identified by the police. The main goal of cyber investigators is to identify the child victims seen in the recordings, in order to protect them and to remove sexually exploited children from their abusive environments. In addition to traditional investigation techniques, great emphasis is placed on the analysis of digital traces.

The unprecedented investigation which took about two years was led by the Cybercrime Department of the National Investigation Bureau Hungary which is also the cooperating partner of Internet Hotline, the Hungarian member of the INHOPE network.

More information about the case can be found here.