Arachnid Data Portal

Tender description

Project Arachnid Data Portal: Home Office would like to obtain this data to help guide industry engagement in the tackling child sexual abuse unit as it will allow us to determine where the most prolific sharing of child sexual abuse material occurs on the internet. As Ofcom become the new regulators of the internet following Royal Ascent of the Online Safety Bill, they will also need this information to help determines the threat online and which platforms/search services are responsive to taking down child sexual abuse. The data that we will be getting from C3P (Supplier) is with regards to their Project Arachnid. This Project was initially funded by the Home Office and has come from a 5 yearlong partnership with this NGO. Project Arachnid is an internet crawler, on both the clear and dark web, to combat the growing proliferation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on the internet. It was initially designed to follow links on sites previously reported to Cybertip.ca that contained CSAM and detect where known images/videos are being made publicly available. Once CSAM is detected, a notice is sent to the provider hosting the content requesting its removal. Project Arachnid now also visits publicly available forums and chatrooms frequented by offenders, where it is reasonably believed that CSAM may be shared or the exploitation of children may be discussed. As of May 2023, Project Arachnid has detected over 55 million suspected images of CSAM requiring further review and has issued over 28 million takedown notices to hosting providers. The portal that the Home Office and Ofcom will be provided with, holds the data collected from C3P's crawler. This data will include Removal Notice Requests sent, the take down time per notice, the hash information and the total media and classification notices.