Located in western Massachusetts, UMass Amherst is the flagship campus of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' five-campus University of Massachusetts system. UMass Amherst is a nationally recognized teaching and research institution with a current enrollment of about 28,500 students.

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Report to Congress: Increasing the Efficacy of Investigations of Online Child Sexual Exploitation

Brian Levine is the founding director of the UMass Amherst Cybersecurity Institute. His research and teaching focus on security on the Internet and in mobile systems, including child rescue, privacy, blockchains, cellular networks and peer-to-peer networking. His work on thwarting child exploitation is funded in part by the Department of Justice and often in collaboration with Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces. 

His research group has developed the App Danger Project to help parents asses the safety of social networking apps

internet-based child exploitation

Digital Forensics

Network Security

Internet Security

Child Rescue

UMass Amherst Faculty Profile

Research Website

Google Scholar Citations

ResearchGate Citations

EZDriveMA texting scam asks for just $6.99, but what is it really after? Here's how you can protect yourself from scams

UMass Prof & Dir of Cybersecurity Inst Brian Levine: social media's dangers to kids & warning labels

Amid Sextortion’s Rise, Computer Scientists Tap A.I. to Identify Risky Apps

brian levine

Instagram 'connects perpetrators' easier than other platforms,regulation needed: Researcher

Damning probes find Instagram is key link connecting pedophile rings

Instagram Connects Vast Pedophile Network

A teen girl sexually exploited on Snapchat takes on American tech

Director of Cybersecurity Institute and Distinguished Professor in the Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences

Shining Light on Internet-based Crimes Against Children

Brian Levine, Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Every day, exploitation crimes against children are captured as images or videos and shared on the Internet. In addition to the immediate harms, these crimes represent long-lasting, enormous privacy violations of the child victims. Such child exploitation materials (i.e., child pornography) is often posted to unmanaged forums, such as file-sharing networks and anonymous servers. Unfortunately, imagery can remain available on the Internet for many years, extending the privacy violation potentially throughout a victim's whole life. Victims report ongoing psychosis, anxiety, and other disorders decades after the abuse has ended, in part from knowing that the images have been viewed widely. And child pornography is used by perpetrators to groom new victims, who are shown images to normalize the abuse. In this talk, I will review measurements of Internet-based crimes against children from our research and that of others. I will describe how forensic tools can be designed to proactively rescue children, especially those too young to speak and report their abuse, and others silenced by fear. And I will discuss the tension between the intent of privacy enhancing technologies and how they are unfortunately leveraged for this crime.

View the full USENIX Security '19 program at https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity19/technical-sessions

USENIX Security 2019 Presentation: Shining Light on Internet-based Crimes Against Children

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