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| Major BitTorrent Uploader Used No Anonymity – Bring Out The Straightjacket? Posted: 10 Mar 2011 04:51 AM PST Just a little over 3 years ago we published an article titled “How a BitTorrent Tracker Owner Hides from the MPAA/RIAA” where we published the techniques one site admin used to keep himself secure and sleeping well at night. While some appreciated the information provided, others saw the precautions as completely over the top and totally unnecessary. “You are worse than the MAFIAA’s scare tactics,” one annoyed reader wrote to me in response. “Why all the paranoia, nothing is this bad? You make people terrified.” Three years on and not only are the points in the article even more relevant than they were in 2008, but in hindsight should have been taken on board by more than just admins. Earlier this month the Swedish authorities and local anti-piracy outfit Antipiratbyran revealed that a major uploader to the now-defunct Swebits tracker – one the oldest BitTorrent sites – had been arrested by the police. The 25-year-old now stands accused of uploading more than 1,000 movies and, if prosecutor Henrik Rassmusson is to be believed, catching him was a breeze. “He had been using his personal Internet account, and he had a static IP address associated with an ISP, so it was not hard to get hold of him,” Rassmusson told Swedish Radio yesterday. While trying to be sympathetic to this guy (who is undoubtedly in pretty serious trouble) isn’t conducting this kind of activity unencrypted or without some level of anonymity simply crazy these days? Isn’t using a VPN or proxy in a foreign land a standard requirement now? Isn’t presuming and preparing for the worst a required skill in 2011? Perhaps it should be. In the 2008 article our friendly admin said he would never pick up his emails without hiding his IP address and again, some people said that was going too far. The recently arrested admin of ChannelSurfing.net might disagree. Google coughed up his records to the feds last month in the blink of an eye. Going even further, the admin said he took precautions to hide his IP address not just on his own site, but when on those operated by others too. Some people laughed – the admin was clearly a paranoid fool, they argued. But roll on to 2011 and many completely innocent fans of PS3 hacker Geohotz are about to have their IP addresses handed over to Sony by Google, YouTube and Twitter. Suddenly it’s not so amusing anymore. When Internet users aren’t even free to watch videos on YouTube and read comments on Twitter without being exposed to the prying eyes of big corporations like Sony and their aggressive lawsuits, isn’t it time to consider some level of anonymity as a prerequisite to even going online? No? We’ll report back in another 3 years. You will have changed your mind – guaranteed. |
| Katz.cd Hacked and Redirected to ‘Scammy’ Pay Site Posted: 09 Mar 2011 01:30 PM PST
This morning Katz visitors noticed a rather dramatic change. After having displayed the message Hacked :) for a short while, visitors to the site were redirected to rapid-downloads.com, a scammy pay-to-download service. Aside from the main site, all subdomains, the forums and Katz’s adult site were redirecting to the same page as well, all via the same referral link. No official explanation has been offered by the site’s operators, but Katz appears to have fallen victim to a malicious hacker who is trying to make a few bucks off unsuspected users. Theories as to the site’s fate currently remain just that, but all signs point to a site or domain vulnerability that has been exploited. TorrentFreak has spoken with sources close to Katz, and although neither could inform us about what was going on, we were assured that the Katz operators themselves have no reason to setup the redirect. This would make sense, particularly since the regular operation would probably bring in more revenue than this type of redirect would, especially in the long run. The question, however, is why it has remained ‘hacked’ for almost a day now? This seems to suggest that something more serious than a code or server vulnerability has struck the site(s). Interestingly, one of Katz’s main competitors PhazeDDL suffered a similar hack during October last year. At the time, the Katz Twitter account took advantage of the situation, claiming it was not hacked but shut down. “PhazeDDL has shut down (not hacked). Have you tried Katz Downloads? http://katz.cd/” one of the tweets said. The true nature of the hack and redirect will probably become clear in the coming days. If we receive more solid information regarding the situation in the coming hours we will add it to this post. Meanwhile, Katz users and the many forums that depend on its traffic will have to remain patient, or try one of the many alternatives. |
With hundreds of thousands of daily visitors, Katz.cd is one of the leading direct download (DDL) directories. The site indexes links to forums and blogs where users can download movies, music, and various other types of entertainment. In addition to cyberlocker links, Katz also lists links to torrents.| You are subscribed to email updates from TorrentFreak To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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