She said: “A great deal of progress has been made with organisations such as the European Financial Collaboration, so we are already doing great things at international level in stopping the funding for illegal websites.
“But I acknowledge how difficult international co-operation can be – and that every police force throughout the world obviously has to work with finite resources.”
Robertson was speaking as the IWF – which tracks and helps take down illegal web content – published its annual report, which shows criminals are still managing to distribute shocking images across the mainstream internet.
The report found that there were around 450 child sex abuse “brands” selling images and videos in the internet with ten of the most prominent accounting for 650 web pages between them.
Alarmingly, the foundation discovered that legitimate websites – including social networking services – were being hacked to distribute illegal content. Most of the criminals were based in North America, Europe and Russia.
Robertson added: “I would say, however, that the problem in the UK is being extremely well controlled, and we have been working closely with the police in carrying out reciprocal training in areas such as image assessment.
“But as the criminals adapt their tactics, we have to modify the way that we work. We are not using the same methods as even two or three years ago.”
A spokeswoman for the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre also believes that criminal tactics are evolving. While acknowledging the IWF concerns that there were still sites operating across the web, she said criminals were increasingly using file sharing and peer-to-peer networks.
The spokeswoman added: “As pay-per-view websites have been closed down, these people have resorted to new methods they consider to be removed from outside influence.
“They are using independent networking with each other, and it is important that we identify these groups. But we are using a variety of tools in our kit to target and trace offenders and creating extra workloads for UK police forces.”
The spokeswoman agreed that co-operation between different agencies was the way forward, highlighting that a combination of thorough investigation, educating children about conducting themselves online and making the internet “safer by design” was needed to keep the criminals on the back foot.
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