Microsoft tip led police to arrest man over child abuse images

A 20-year-old man in Pennsylvania has been charged with receiving and sharing child abuse images after Microsoft tipped off police that he was allegedly storing and sending illegal images using Microsoft services.

Microsoft discovered the image involving a young girl allegedly within the man’s cloud storage account.

The man was subsequently caught allegedly attempting to email two illegal images via a Microsoft email account.

Microsoft’s digital crimes unit alerted the US National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) which serves as the central reporting authority for suspected child abuse cases.

The agency then liaised with law enforcement leading to his arrest on 31 July, court documents published by The Smoking Gun show.

The court documents explain that the man allegedly acquired the image using Kik Messenger on a mobile device. He is currently held at the Monroe County Correctional Facility, facing five charges related to his alleged possession and distribution of child abuse images, scheduled for a preliminary hearing in Magisterial District Court on 14 August.

‘We use automated technologies to detect abusive behaviour’

“Child pornography violates the law as well as our terms of service, which makes clear that we use automated technologies to detect abusive behaviour that may harm our customers or others,” said Mark Lamb from Microsoft’s digital crimes unit.

“In 2009, we helped develop PhotoDNA, a technology to disrupt the spread of exploitative images of children, which we report to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children as required by law,” he said.

The PhotoDNA scanning software creates a unique signature for each image using data about the pixels of the image. Those signatures can then be tracked and matched, allowing Microsoft as well as Google, Facebook,Twitter and others to detect flagged photos.

No employees of any of the technology companies have to look at the images, solely relying on the “DNA” of the image to compare matches.

The PhotoDNA system is also used to prevent child abuse images appearing in search results.

Google recently tipped off NCMEC to a similar child abuse situation where illegal images were shared via a Gmail account, leading to the arrest of a 41-year-old Texan.

• How Microsoft, Google and ISPs aim to halt child abuse images