The ‘largest haul yet,’ according to PLDT, who credits the campaign’s success to a partnership with the UK-based Internet Watch Foundation.
PLDT reported removing more than 10,000 links to online child abuse materials on Friday, June 18, including 4,500 URLs and domains linked to online sexual abuse and child exploitation (OSAEC).
PLDT said it can achieve its “largest haul ever” because of a relationship with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) in the United Kingdom, which began in April this year.
The IWF is a non-profit organization that maintains an extensive collection of internet child abuse resources culled from their public reporting portals, in-house analysts, and partner law enforcement and government agencies. The non-profit then collaborates with international partners such as PLDT and Smart, the Philippines’ first IWF partners. IWF partners include Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google, among others.
According to PLDT, the information provided by IWF assists them in blocking unlawful content “on the more difficult content level.”
“With this capability, PLDT and Smart can restrict consumers from viewing detected child abuse files, including those that have been uploaded on legitimate domains,” PLDT stated in a statement.
In total, the business said it had blocked access to more than 13,000 URLs and domains that hosted the illegal content.
British intelligence also confirmed to the corporation that the bulk of patrons of online child abuse materials come from industrialized countries in the Americas and Europe.
According to Angel Redoble, PLDT and Smart’s chief information security officer, they also analyze bandwidth traffic to detect possible live streaming hotspots. “When a specific IP address shows a rapid surge in bandwidth usage, PLDT and Smart can alert law enforcement agencies so that they can look into it further because it could be tied to OSAEC.” “A sudden surge of data traffic is common when live streaming,” Redoble remarked.