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AI-generated child abuse materials, newest emerging threat -- telcos

Published Aug 2, 2023 04:56 am
Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated child sexual abuse and exploitation materials (CSAEM) have become the newest emerging threat, local telcos warned. “We urge fellow child rights and child safety advocates to come up with anti-online sexual abuse and exploitation of children (OSAEC) programs adaptive to the rapidly changing environment,” said Angel Redoble, Chief Information Security Officer of both PLDT Inc. and Smart Communications Inc. The UK-based Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), of which the local telcos are members, has confirmed sighting of AI-generated child sexual abuse images. Of the 29 reports it investigated between May 24 and June 30, the organization confirmed seven URLs (uniform resource locators) containing AI-generated CSAEM. IWF said that some examples are so life-like they would be indistinguishable from real imagery to most people. “This development not only poses a challenge to the technology side of counteracting OSAEC, but it also tests the limits of our laws in addressing the menace,” Redoble said on Wednesday, Aug. 2. So far, PLDT and Smart’s membership to the IWF has been a vital cog in their pioneering Child Protection Platform which blocks CSAEM at the content level. IWF regularly provides "hashes" to the PLDT Group which it blocks in real time. PLDT and Smart’s blocking tool houses a vault of OSAEC-related URLs containing more than 660,000 links that have been blocked from their networks. In the first half of the year, the telcos' Cyber Security Operations Group (CSOG) managed to block more than a million attempts to open sites that host child sexual abuse imagery.
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