How Netsweeper and Project Arachnid Tackle Online Child Exploitation

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P) launched Project Arachnid in January 2017 as a response to the proliferation of child sexual abuse material witnessed by Cybertip.ca.

Project Arachnid plays an important part in eliminating online child exploitation by detecting known images and videos of child sexual abuse material and issuing notices to the hosting provider requesting its removal.

Here are some of Project Arachnid’s statistics as of July 10, 2019:

  • 79 billion+ images processed
  • 85% of the notices issued relate to victims who are not known to have been identified by police
  • 10.2 million+ images triggered for analyst review

In 2018, Netsweeper was granted access to the Project Arachnid List for inclusion into our platform to take the fight against online child exploitation to the next level. The Project Arachnid List is a list of harename.sh values and near matches that correspond to material believed to be child sexual abuse material.

Netsweeper categorizes and sends C3P a feed of URLs that contain Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). C3P uses this feed to complement Project Arachnid activities.

Netsweeper uses the Project Arachnid List in version 4.0.0 and above. You can use the Project Arachnid list in this version (or later) to block content believed to be CSAM on your network.

This Project Arachnid List is used in all filtering deployments: in-line, proxy, out-of-line, and in SSL decryption.

Netsweeper is proud to be a longstanding ally of C3P and continues to support their goal of eliminate child sexual abuse material online.

Learn more about Project Arachnid and how you can help on their website.