The U.K. Home Office says child porn and pedophilia are the Internet's top criminal threats, with related issues occupying all but three of the top ten slots of a Home Office survey isolating serious Net crime threats.
Polling 53 Internet and technology experts, the Home Office turned up seven different concerns tied to child porn or pedophilia, with the top being "grooming" children online for sex or porn and possibly stalking them. Growing corporate espionage ranked second behind that, the survey said.
The Home Office reviewed 101 total crime issues and 12 all told tied to child porn or pedophilia. Behind grooming and stalking, the other six child porn/pedophilia concerns in the top ten were more access to child porn and pedophilic content sold by "organized" criminals; storing pedophilic images in online storage facilities and bypassing home computers; using peer-to-peer programs for child porn and pedophilia; encryption for secure pedophilic network access; growing access to real-time online child abuse; and, grooming children for sex abuse through mobile phone technology.
The other two top ten Net crime issues, the Home Office survey said, were stealing personal digital assistants or cell phones that include personal information to commit Internet fraud; and, using P2P programs for online piracy.
“The Government, law enforcement and industry needs to ‘gear up’ their capability to continuously look forward, attempting to identify new forms of criminal technology misuse as soon as they emerge, or even before they are seized upon by the criminal community,” the Home Office survey, called "The Future of Netcrime Now," said.
The survey also said the higher media profile of child porn and pedophilia in the Internet age may have helped make it so prominent among the top ten online crimes.
