INTERPOL's Michael Moran Receives 2017 M3AAWG Litynski Award; Urges Industry to Improve Defenses Against Child Abuse Materials

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Feb 21, 2017) -  Michael "Mick" Moran, who has helped rescue thousands of child abuse material victims since he started working in the field in 1997, challenged the internet industry to do more to protect innocent children as he received the 2017 M³AAWG Mary Litynski Award today. Moran, assistant director of INTERPOL's Vulnerable Communities Unit, was honored at the 39^th general meeting of the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group for his personal commitment to this challenging work and for fostering international cooperation to fight online exploitation.

The M³AAWG Mary Litynski Award recognizes the life-time achievements of a person whose work has significantly contributed to the safety of the online community. In his acceptance presentation and in a video for the M3AAWG YouTube channel, Moran outlined some of the changing strategies in battling child abuse materials and offered suggestions on how the industry can better safeguard its networks.

Until a few years ago, dealing in child abuse materials (CAM) was basically a commercial enterprise and its photos or movies were widely circulated online. But industry efforts, such as controlling the flow of spam used to circulate links to these materials, has largely driven it off the open Web and into private emails, cloud storage and live streaming events, Moran explained.

"Up to 95 percent of abuse materials today are exchanged like-for-like, without any money changing hands, with the real currency being the pain of the children. But every picture, every movie, involves a real child and we have become very victim-centric at INTERPOL. We are moving away from the whack-a-mole work of catching someone for possessing or distribution and are now thinking about what we can do as law enforcement to identify that child and thereby stop the abuse," he said.

Growing out of this child-centric strategy, the International Child Sexual Exploitation database is used to identify and locate victims. INTERPOL maintains ICSE, which connects fifty countries and provides them with current information on vulnerable children. The ICSE data helps identify an average of six victims a day around the world, ranging in age from infants to pre-teens, according to Moran.