Hackers have gone on a rampage recently; these dirty little old men have hacked their way into multiple web servers where they proceeded to upload child abuse images for safekeeping. Hackers borrowing space on a company’s web server is nothing new, heck, they have even used these servers to host multiplayer games, but this is the first time we heard of someone hiding child abuse images on the servers of legitimate websites.

Researchers claim attackers create an “orphan folder” on remote computers that consist of children being abused sexually. Some of these children are newborn babies, which goes to show how violent and sick these people are. Furthermore, it is understood hackers would takeover links on porn websites and redirect visitors to the child porn content stored on the hacked servers.

“We hadn’t seen significant numbers of hacked websites for around two years, and then suddenly in June we started seeing this happening more and more,” according to IWF’s technical researcher, Sarah Smith. “We speculate that the motivation behind the hacking is to distribute malware, specifically a Trojan.”

To make matters worse, often times it would go unnoticed on the targeted servers that their websites are being used to store child abuse images. Indeed, many companies, school institutions, or regular computer users, have no idea their devices are used to store child abuse content. This is a serious problem because folks could face the full-blown force of the law if they are unable to prove these contents belong to some outsider held up in a dark basement. We recommend all dotTech readers to keep your antivirus updated and take measure to stay away from infected porn sites during your nightly routine.

In addition, if you’re rich, you could become Batman and hunt these child abusers. We’re certain at least one would look like the Joker. Please do take pictures.

[via BBC, image via Shredquick]