Mal de Debarquement syndrome; French term for “sickness of disembarkment” and describes the feeling a sailor might have after receiving their sea legs and returning to shore. You know your back on stable ground, but the world still feels like it’s swaying from side-to-side. It’s a good metaphor for the experience of emerging from crawling through the dark places of the internet during the Anti-human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative’s (ATII) event, Darkwebathon 2023.

If you are unfamiliar with what the ATII Darkwebathon is, let me use their words and not mine.

“This hackathon-inspired tech for good event is meant for the brightest minds in the industry to yield actionable intelligence with the goal of fighting child exploitation and child sexual abuse material by detecting, investigating, and reporting data found on the darkweb and our ATII CSAM Information Sharing initiative.”

I knew I was going to be crawling through the darkweb but I wasn’t prepared to feel in the dark by the event itself. So here are just a few things to consider when participating in this sort of event.

A) Communicate early and often. Additional registration requirements for blockchain analysis certificates emerged with within a month of the event, so staying on top of communications is critical.

B) Press event planners for timeline details and reach out to former participants if necessary for what to expect. I had taken off time from work to attend the various training and sponsor presentations leading up to the investigation. Only about 3hrs of the slotted 8 were programmed which could have been easily made up after working hours.

C) Stay flexible. The schedule may change, so give yourself some leeway but also know your limits. Investigations were scheduled to start June 15th and instead had a quite opening the following morning. The “lightning round” was scheduled to end 11:30am and ended up being extended 4 more days to Friday at 5pm due to being short on judges and big on data.

D) Get as much information as you can about scoring ahead of time. If you are the competitive type, finding out critical scoring details after the fact, such as team averaging, may ruin the joy of working towards a great cause.

E) Choose your team wisely based on what you want out of the event. If you are looking to network and have a good time with people from literally all over the world, max out a diverse team. You might have to be a bit more selective though if you are in it to win.

One of the more amazing features of the Darkwebathon was all the sponsors who turned out for the event! If you are in law enforcement, investigative journalism, cybersecurity, or any other investigative field, this is a great opportunity to trial software and services you might not normally have access to in your regular line of work. All of them have their own strengths and weaknesses, but two in particular stand out to this chameleon, Maltego and Bluestone Analytics (and no, neither of them are paying me to say that). Maltego is a fairly well known open-source tool which needs little introduction. While many dark web exploration tools exist, Bluestone Analytics seemed to be one of the best for searching for specific content while protecting anonymity and the investigators emotional well-being. Yes, I said “emotional well-being” because if you have not already figured it out by this point, one comes across some pretty disturbing stuff in the dark web. Even with Bluestone’s capability of filtering out images, reading the people’s warped ideas can evoke of emotions often beginning with sadness and sometimes morphing into anger 😡👇

Which leads us full circle back to Mal de Debarquement syndrome. Returning to normal life (depending on what your normal is) may feel a little disorienting. Those departmental squabbles just don’t carry the same weight. How does one move on knowing that there are still people out there who can’t? There’s certainly no easy solution. In some ways isn’t that the point? Maybe one day the worst thing some of these victims will be able to complain about from their week is the smell from their neighbor bringing boiled eggs for breakfast 🤢.