For years, Anon-IB, the internet’s most notorious epicenter of revenge porn, thrived as users posted nude photos and videos of women without their consent. They published these images under the assumption that they were anonymous—their usernames were “Anonymous” followed by a string of letters. A new heatmap visualization using IP adresses of Anon-IB users highlights that people who share revenge porn on the forum weren’t as anonymous as they may have thought. In March, cybercrime teams from the Dutch police seized the Anon-IB forum as part of an investigation. Einar Otto Stangvik, a Norwegian security analyst, turned the IP address data—strings of numbers that reveal the location of a computer connected to the internet—that he collected before the seizure, into a heat map of where people were posting from. Stangvik shared much of the data, which spans from February 2015 to January 2018, with The Daily Beast in January. Across…
anon-ib
An article about the website Anon-IB recently garnered national attention when dozens of male Marines posted nude photographs of their female colleagues. Anon-IB—short for Anonymous Image Board—is one of many “revenge porn” websites that encourage users to post explicit photos of their exes, without the exes’ consent. Anon-IB receives 50,000 individual visitors each day and its page views can average 170,000, according to the New York Post. The site’s categories include “drunk/passed out,” “peeping toms” and “up-the-skirt” photos. Some material depicts molestation and rape, with many of the girls pictured below the age of 18. Users can post teenage girls’ pictures, as long as the tag does not contain their age, according to the New York Post. Revenge porn epitomizes the failure of legislators and policymaking to catch up with the rapid progression of technology. Georgia resident Brandon Lee Gary, for example, had been convicted for taking up-the-skirt photos of…
Lisa M. can’t walk around her hometown without wondering who has seen her naked. The 28-year-old from Gardner, Mass., was only 17 when her then-boyfriend snapped a couple of topless photos of her when she wasn’t looking. She loved him, trusted him and had no idea he even owned a camera. Years later, the pictures would surface online and spread all over her tiny hometown. “To see those online was just like a total betrayal of trust, and on top of that, there’s nothing you can do about it — it’s just there, and you can’t take it down, and you don’t know who’s seen it,” she said. The pictures had been posted to the Web site “Anon-IB,” a k a Anonymous Image Board, one of the world’s main online promoters of revenge porn — intimate photos that are uploaded typically by a former sex partner and without the subject’s consent. Anon-IB…