”Operation Twins” was the result of a 12 month investigation by
law enforcement authorities in Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany,
Italy, Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the US and
the UK.
The operation focused on a criminal organisation called the
“Shadowz Brotherhood,” whose activities included the production and
distribution of child pornography and real-time abuse of
children.
Dawn raids carried out simultaneously across seven countries
resulted in searches of nearly 50 premises and in all cases the
occupants were implicated in crimes relating to child abuse and/or
pornography. There were 30 arrests, 6 of them in the UK.
According to the Silicon.com, which spoke to the UK’s National
Hi-tech Crime Unit, the group hosted its material on numerous
servers located globally. The location of the material changed
frequently. Access to the servers would be gained via one or more
proxy servers that would hide the IP address of the member. The
group used encryption and also steganography, the practice of
hiding of one file within another for extraction by the intended
recipient.
