Funding for this research was provided by:
Institute for Information and Communications Technology Promotion (2022-0-00281)
Article History
First Online: 22 August 2023
Declarations
:
: The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this study.
: In this study, we have established the following ethical policies, followed them strictly, and conducted research, based on the ethical implementation considered in previous studies [CitationRef removed–CitationRef removed]. (1) If a word related to illegality is found on a website, we extract and analyze only the text data of the website. For example, if the word ‘child’ is found, even if it is not actually an illegal site, only text data is extracted and then analyzed because the web page may contain CSAM. (2) When the disturbing image detector determined that a crawled dark website has illegal images, we extract and analyze only the text data. The illegal image is not stored in our system. (3) We do not access the sub-URL collected by the machine in the dark web. We focus on the evidence found on the main page. Special judicial police officer of Korea Copyright Protection Agency (KCOPA) conducted an ethical review of this study. The websites were reported to the police. Under the supervision of the agency, we did not share information without approval. The source code was also not disclosed due to potential abuse.
: This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.