”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.