Using hacking methods never seen before in the history of law enforcement, the FBI have hacked the dark web, infiltrating the largest remaining known child pornography service in the world. A new report has revealed that the FBI secretly took control of a child porn website early last year and began infecting visitors with malware to identify around 1,300 individuals who had allegedly logged-on using software designed to browse the Internet anonymously. RT reports: The site, known as ‘Playpen’, launched in August 2014 and allowed users to sign up and upload images, primarily for “the advertisement and distribution of child pronagraphy”. Within a month of Playpen’s launch, the website had garnered nearly 60,000 members. By 2015 that number had jumped to almost 215,000, with 11,000 unique users visiting the site each week, and a total of 117,000 posts. Many of those posts contained some of the most extreme child abuse images one could imagine, according to FBI testimony seen by Motherboard. Although the website also included advice on how users could avoid online detection, a sting operation began in February 2015 when the FBI hacked into the website’s server, but decided not to shut it down. The bureau took the [...]