Hackers Surreptitiously Downloading Mr. Bean To Your Computer?
from the what-will-they-think-of-next? dept
A few years ago, we noted a novel approach to people defending themselves against computer crime: "a virus did it." It even worked for a guy who was charged with tax evasion, despite the fact that no virus could be found on his computer -- and it only seemed to impact him. However, with malware writers getting more and more sophisticated these days, it's increasingly likely that malicious hackers could do bad things on your machine, leaving you on the hook. We've already discussed how the entertainment industry's lawsuits seem weak since they can't really prove who was responsible for anything they see -- and it looks like some malicious hackers may be taking advantage of that. Someone over at Digg points to a story about a surreptitiously installed rootkit that installs BitTorrent and starts downloading movies (in this case, Mr. Bean) to the infected computers. It's not hard to see how someone could then be accused by the entertainment industry of illegally sharing the movie, even though they had no idea it was even on their computer. While the original poster isn't entirely sure why they're doing this, it's not hard to come up with a few ideas. Remember those online extortion rings that would threaten sites with denial of service attacks if they don't pay up? Imagine the same thing directed at individuals, threatening to get them in trouble for all sorts of illegal things on their computer that they had no idea were even there.
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BTW yes PC users have excuse for dl'n ilegal stuff, alas us *ix users where viruses don't exist for uss. Haha
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old idea, new data....
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Automated extortion
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Here a reason:
Make 25 versions of said virus, (1 Movie each, or if you are really enterprising, 2,5 or maybe 10 diff movies per virius). Drop them on 25 computers and let their bandwidth soak it up at a slower speed in hopes they don't notice (And what AOL user would?). Then Dl them from the client to your machine. Really, how many putertards notice the upload bandwidth do anything at all let alone cap out?
Hmmm... I have work to do ;)
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Re: Here a reason:
That would pretty much guarantee you dont get a visit from the MPAA lawyers. Only the infected users with the infected PCs are downloading it from the P2P network.
Another possibility would be these are being installed by some arm of the MPAA themselves providing them with targets to aim lawsuits at to make an example of a few more people.
Ordinarily I would say there is no way they would be that underhanded, but 6 months ago I would have said the same thing if someone told me Sony were installing rootkits through their audio CDs....
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Based on your spelling and grammar, one could say much the same about you.
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still not sharing
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everybody should do it...
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Re: Here a reason:
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
Sony isn't evil. Granted, someone somewhere in there knew what was going on, but I'd guarantee that the executive decision makers were too technically ignorant to understand the real impact. It's just a case of stupidity.
As for the rest of your conspiracy theory... good luck with that.
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Here's an Idea!
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sub7
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Re: everybody should do it...
Even if you don't have the virus on your computer, you would be able to make the claim that you reformatted your HD to get rid of the virus/other problems. People reformat all the time. So even if they do have an ISP log of you downloading a movie and try to sue you 6 months later for it, you can claim to have reformatted after getting the virus and removed the movie in the process. Any decent lawyer could win this case. This is the future of these lawsuits once people start to figure it out.
The people who write these viruses are saviors. People just don't realize it yet.
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Though there are a number of ways that this could be defeated by the MPAA there are just as many ways it could be improved so the MPAA couldn't defeate it.
I believe that in either form (virus or anonymizer/seeder) it is the best answer to making bt safe enough for general use while not slowing it down or requiring a special network like i2p, actually as stated it could be made to increase DL speed for others on the torrentrs you seed.
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mr.bean
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