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Film Industry Hires Cyber Hitmen To Take Down Pirates
thelostagency writes "Girish Kumar, managing director of Aiplex Software says his company is being hired by the film industry to attack online pirates. He says if a provider did not do anything to remove the link or content hosted on its site, his company would launch what is known as a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on the offending computer server. From the article: 'Kumar said that at the moment most of the payment for his company's services came from the film industry in India. "We are tied up with more than 30 companies in Bollywood. They are the major production houses." As for Hollywood films, he said they, too, used his services.'"
Aren't DoS attacks illegal? If so, why not?
If DDOS attacks are suddenly legal, there are a fuckton of servers I want to point at the MPAA right now.
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In other news, I've decided I'm going to start shooting out the tires of cars that I witness passing on the right.
or should I be going after Ford?
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21st century version of a protection racket? "Do what we say or we'll beat your connections down."
Let's see a graph of how their earnings went up during the attack.
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Because DoS attacks never harm innocent bystanders like the ISP, *THEIR* ISP, or other customers of either of them.
We have enough problems with DoS attacks launched by miscreants. So, yeah, maybe some of these ISPs don't take reports seriously, but I do know that not all "copyright enforcement" type actions are well researched...
This one time we got a DMCA takedown notice from a software vendor in Australia for a site run by a department of a local university, for running an unlicensed copy of their software. The DMCA takedown notice was sent to my company because they "couldn't find the contact information" *FOR A UNIVERSITY*. I found it by clicking on the "contact" link on the page they made the takedown request for.
Turns out that the university *DID* have a license for the software, BTW.
I know it's annoying when your stuff gets stolen, but don't go attacking people.
DDOS attacks require a ton of people to properly work. Torrents sites are going to have a very large bandwidth and the ability to service many clients at the same time. So he's probably going to need more than one company to do it.
Secondly, if they're all in the same company, chances are they have a similar IP range - which means that any admin worth his salt can disconnect them from the network.
Of course, if they use a botnet, to do so - which is probably the only plausable way - they're going to be breaking quite a few international laws - and get sued into oblivion.
So yeah, I think this is going to end up in tears.
Five minutes on Google, and they already look like tools. They're amateur spammers, too. I find it hard to believe anyone hired them for anything. Why don't you have a look yourself, and if you wish, tell these utter clowns what you think about their business methods?
+91 95386 66666
+91 98451 28280
karan@aiplex.com
rajani@aiplex.com
girish@aiplex.com
mahesh_r_blr@hotmail.com
+91 80 2503 5411
www.onlineantimoviepiracy.com
www.reportmoviepiracy.com
Aiplex Founded in 2003 provides net Vigilance services & is a leading provider of Windows-based Network Vulnerability & security Solutions that enable corporations to safely conduct business operations via Internet. The following are the solutions rendered to various clients across the globe.
a)Search engine optimization
b)Medical Transcription services
c)Email marketing / e-campaign
d)Business solution & Statistical Analysis
e)Net Vigilance (The complete corporate / Media security for copyright contents)
Net Vigilance
We are proud to claim that we are the only Net vigilant company in the Globe thus far to provide unprecedented services on Internet based piracies. To eradicate piracy at its best possible, we strategically follow some of the best practices outlined below;
a)Finding the links of the unauthorized content using appropriate software which co-relates the copy right / licensed material in any given format.
b)A detailed statistical analysis of the site which has such pirated content would be made available on a weekly/fortnight basis - they are so called the very enemies to the creator.
c)Our 24/7 net vigilant agents & customer support team will have a rigorous check on video sharing communities and do regular check ups for copy right deviation.
d)We shall approach the service provider with the authenticated links of the unscrupulous pirated products being uploaded & appeal them to remove the content/file by sending legal notice / request letter for violation of copyrights.
e)Our 24/7-support team would also prevent the damage by sending instant legal notices to the service provider & block the account for deviating copyright laws.
Techniques used in identifying & preventing the copyright damage
a)We shall promote various articles in leading forums & reiterate the pros & cons of copy right deviation.
b)Creating accounts in popular social network communities and inviting people to contribute in locating the unscrupulous videos or duplication of an original recording for commercial gain without the consent of owners.
c)Conducting torrent search with torrent Meta sites using software.
d)Conducting music search with music meta sites
e)Conducting video search with video spotters and video sharing meta search engines
f)We can prevent by sending a strict warning notice/legal notice to certain service provider who invite their clients to upload videos & movies for the benefit of having more traffic to their site.
g)We can provide the copyright infringement articles which helps the company to promote and update their method of protection against the piracy.
h)We will seek advice from various technology forums that are implemented which could help the copyright content owners to protect their material against piracy.
Aiplex Net Vigilance strength lies in DATA BASE
We have a huge database of popular forums, search engines, torrents, video sharing communities, blogs & social networking communities which can be used to reduce the rate of piracy growth in Bollywood.
a)We have a list of 14500 leading torrents where movies are uploaded currently.
b) A list of 97 leading movie uploading sites where people are allowed to upload more than 1GB single file is available with us.
c)A mega list of 40000 plus forums where general discussion are made will have high impact while we invite aspirants to share views or locate the pirated content on web will surely reduce piracy.
d)A list of leading 159 video sharing communities
I think most will, but to be honest this sounds more like a desperate call for free press to me. I mean, c'mon a guy basically goes out of his way to say "hey, they've hired us to take down torrent sites, and guess what? we're awesome at what we do!" Sounds fishy to me. Then, of course, there are the legal issues:
At time, we have to go an extra mile and attack the site and destroy the data to stop the movie from circulating any further
So, not only does he plan on launching a DoS attack, but he also plans on destroying the data? Sorry, even governments investigating CP won't do that, let alone some small private company.
Now let's assume, however, that he's telling the truth. Would major motion studios actually be that stupid (jokes aside) to give him discretion to bring up their names? He brings them up as if it were nothing.
Sorry, but this is all too much for me - let me be the one to call bullshit on this article and to the author who fell for it bait, line and sinker
Actually, this one goes even one step further and illustrates yet another aspect of what's wrong with vigilantism, namely: harm to innocent bystanders. You know, people who even the vigilante never accused of doing anything wrong.
DDOS-ing a hosted tracker somewhere, essentially can DDOS the whole colocation company. There'll be a bunch of small company servers there, a bunch of kids' blogs, some community page, maybe a couple of Teamspeak and Ventrilo servers, stuff like that. It's not even a hypothetical scenario. The Pirate Bay servers for example, as probably the most famous tracker, were hosted at such a company. And basically then everyone else there is colateral damage, even though they never did anything wrong with those servers.
DDOS-ing enough users of an ISP essentially stuffs the pipe for everyone else too, even if they never torrented even legit stuff. Maybe not completely if it's a major ISP, but still lag them majorly, and if it's essentially a cable ISP trunk that only has the max bandwidth of cable, it's possible to actually cut a whole building or city block in the suburbs off the net.
And that doesn't even have to mean just the inconvenience of living a couple of hours without lolcats or porn or WoW. In the meantime a bunch of people rely on VOIP for their phone. So they could prevent someone from calling an ambulance or the cops. It's not just got the potential to cause a little collateral damage, but actually very disproportionate collateral damage: it could cause a grandma somehwere to die, just so the fuckwits can annoy a file sharer.
To use the earlier sending-assassins-after-shoplifters analogy, it's more like sending someone to torch the whole city block down because they followed a shoplifter to that location. Even by the standards of criminal organizations, it's like torching the whole condominium down because the guy running the grocery store at ground floor didn't pay his protection money. I'm pretty sure even the mafia generally avoided something that disproportionate, if nothing else, because they were trying to not alienate the population all that much. (In fact, quite the contrary, for example Al Capone was running soup kitchens for the poor to whitewash his public image.)
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Every time this kind of topic is discussing, I see a lot more posts claiming that everyone on Slashdot defends piracy than posts that actually defend piracy.
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1. TFA says that if they shut down an Austrailian site, they're in deep poodoo.
2. The DMCA only applies in the US. Nobody else has to worry about it
3. I see DDoS war on the horizon. How long until Aiplex Software is knocked off the internet? I'm betting it won't be long.
4. I'm also betting that NOBODY from the US film industry will spend a minute in jail over their blatantly illegal activities. In the US, if you have enough money you're above the law. A rich, powerful man only goes to prison if a richer, more powerful man wants him there.
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