Entertainment Industry Copyright Notice Acknowledgement Forms Easily Hacked

from the nice-work,-baytsp dept

Thu, May 14th 2009 3:44am — Mike Masnick

One of the companies that the entertainment industry hires to send out nastygrams to people it believes are file sharing illegally is BayTSP. The company tries to hunt down IP addresses and then try to notify the user. Apparently, a part of this process is also to include a link to a web form where the user can respond to the notice and tell BayTSP if you will comply with their infringement notice and remove the offending files from your computer. Except, some are noticing, that BayTSP's method of doing this isn't even remotely secure, so the response forms are available for anyone to see -- and to respond to. You can find your own with a little help from Google.

Even worse, you could send your own notices, pretending to be BayTSP, and get people to fill out the forms instead. And, on top of that, some have discovered that BayTSP's site has some scripting vulnerabilities such that you could create a fake complaint and get people to, say, download malware or enter credit card data. Once again demonstrating the high level of technical incompetence from the folks the RIAA and MPAA hire to piss off fans worldwide.

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Filed Under: copyright notices, security
Companies: baytsp

9 Comments

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Zaven (profile), 14 May 2009 @ 4:33am

Nefarious Thoughts Abound
What's that, we can use the site to send nastygrams to anyone? What are the names of some of those RIAA and MPAA lawyers? Hell, if enough people did this it would rank up there with that Piratebay payment scheme.

Here's the question, is the MPAA aware that BayTSP's process is unsecure? If not, then they're just idiots. If so, hasn't some government official grandstanded about this insecurity and put it into a law. What about the children? These insecurities could hurt the children.
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George, 14 May 2009 @ 4:34am

Time to head over congress.gov
And get the email of all the congress critters...
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Anonymous Coward, 14 May 2009 @ 5:19am

I can't even imagine what it's like for RIAA hiring managers
Seriously, even in a down economy, taking a job with the RIAA, MPAA or BSA is like selling your soul in the computing world.

Forget a person's personal feelings about piracy in general, these groups are technological shake down organizations.
One of two scenarios played out:
1) They couldn't find a decent developer to build the site (or were tired of interviews where the candidate laughed at them on their way out of the room), so they handed it to "some guy's son" who works in the organization and "knows HTML"
2) The guy who built it made it intentionally insecure, and then tipped off the general tech press for street cred shortly after walking into a telephone booth, changing clothes and flying away never to be seen again.

Perhaps that's wishful thinking, but a guy can dream.
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Mechwarrior, 14 May 2009 @ 6:09am

Once this hits 4chan, its over.
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- UBW, 14 May 2009 @ 6:32am
  
  Re:
  I am sure they already know
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Carl Ford, 14 May 2009 @ 6:17am

Your missing the point.
This just helps their case that the Internet is no place for copyrighted materials.

The more incompetence the more their point to congress.

The goal should be to highlight what works against their errors.
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Wammer, 14 May 2009 @ 7:17am

RICO the RIAA
They are simply using mob tactics of intimidation and fear. If we stop buying products that use the RIAA and the MPAA then they are shut down. We pay our money to the copyright office to protect our work for us. Instead the government doesn't protect our work at all (as usual) and gives the job to a private agency that has no power except to sue. Stop buying CD's that are registered by ASCAP, BMI or SESAC. They are the ones who are supposed to protect our copyrights instead of a gestapo agency like the RIAA. They collect the royalties and distribute them to the copyright holders.
BUY indie. RICO the RIAA
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Don Marti, 15 May 2009 @ 9:06am

Failure is the goal.
They deliberately do a bad job with suing users, so that they'll be able to justify lobbying for a DRM mandate in the future. Better and more lucrative end-user lawsuits would be better for everybody.
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ikegami, 15 May 2009 @ 1:27pm

How are you suppose to reply to
http://webreply.baytsp.com/webreply/webreply.jsp?customerid=131&commhash=af36fb1762bc84fd3c9 8ef8121147003

BayTSP is asking for a movie title to be removed from BitTorrent. Not a .torrent file from a server, not an .avi from a torrent user's computer, but the removal of a torrent from an ISP.

"[X] Yes, Additional info: The infringement in question has long left our network on its own due to the very nature of network traffic".
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