Combating online child sexual abuse content

Graham Cluley
Graham Cluley
@
@[email protected]
@gcluley

IWF awareness day
Today is the fourth Internet Watch Foundation Awareness Day, and Sophos is pleased to support the initiative to make more people aware of the extremely valuable service that the IWF provides. We support the IWF’s aims and work with them to protect internet users from inadvertent exposure to child sexual abuse images.

The IWF is the UK internet hotline for the public to report their inadvertent exposure to online child sexual abuse content hosted anywhere in the world and non-photographic child sexual abuse images, criminally obscene adult content and incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK.

From time to time SophosLabs encounters website content and images in spam which are extremely disturbing, and where appropriate we report these to the IWF.

IWF was established in 1996 by the UK internet industry and works in partnership with the wider online industry, law enforcement, government, the education sector, charities, international partners and the public to minimise the availability of content within its remit. As a result of this self-regulatory approach, less than 1% of online child sexual abuse content has apparently been hosted in the UK since 2003, down from 18% in 1997.

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For more information or to report a website visit www.iwf.org.uk. Apparently the site has dealt with over 35,000 reports so far this year.


Graham Cluley is an award-winning keynote speaker who has given presentations around the world about cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. A veteran of the computer security industry since the early 1990s, he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows, makes regular media appearances, and is the co-host of the popular "Smashing Security" podcast. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

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