Bizarre Indian Anti-Piracy Group Says It Does DoS Attacks On File Sharing Operations

from the oh-really? dept

Thu, Sep 9th 2010 4:23am — Mike Masnick

This one's just a bit strange. TorrentFreak alerts us to the news of an Indian company called AiPlex, which (according to its website) seems to do a bit of medical transcription, a bit of SEO and... just for fun, a bit of anti-piracy work. Apparently AiPlex's CEO explains that one of their anti-piracy methods is to hit non-cooperative sites with a denial of service attack:

"In such cases, we flood the website with requests, which results in database error, causing denial of service as each server has a fixed bandwidth capacity," Kumar reveals. And it doesn't stop there.

"At times, we have to go an extra mile and attack the site and destroy the data to stop the movie from circulating further," he adds.

TorrentFreak also notes that this firm seems a bit confused over how BitTorrent works, in that it lists "Bram Cohen" as a type of BitTorrent client, which I'm sure amuses Bram). Watch out, Bram, or a medical transcription SEO company might try to flood you with requests, resulting in a database error.

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Filed Under: anti-piracy, denial of service
Companies: aiplex

23 Comments

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abc gum, 9 Sep 2010 @ 5:10am

Vigilante justice is an oxymoron
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Richard (profile), 9 Sep 2010 @ 5:19am

Re:
Vigilantism is pretty much always illegal. Electronic vigilantism is no different.
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from india, 9 Sep 2010 @ 5:29am

They know how much money is there
This is just a shitty company trying to draw attention from the indian film and music industry so that they can also make a lot of money from both the film studios by charging them for service, downloaders (sending them legal notice to pay them otherwise face the consequences) and also if possible from the p2p websites. They have realised that some so called anti piracy companies in west are making a lot of money and in india there is no such company to exploit the business opportunity so they are trying to be the first one to do so
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grumpy (profile), 9 Sep 2010 @ 5:35am

Seems like a short-term business plan
1. "We do illegal stuff so that YOU don't have to"
2. ???
3. Profit!

This will be entertaining. :-)
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Danny, 9 Sep 2010 @ 5:37am

You what would be funny
is if their site got hit with a DoS Attack and then got hacked. But then of course they would be screaming bloody murder.
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imbrucy (profile), 9 Sep 2010 @ 5:47am

Re: You what would be funny
Post a link to the website on slashdot to cover the DoS. If you want them hacked too just post a link on 4chan.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Sep 2010 @ 5:55am

So obviously this works like a charm...
..because I've noticed lately that "piracy" stopped cold.

I was wondering what happened, there.
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Anubhav C, 9 Sep 2010 @ 6:06am

Re: Re: You what would be funny
Honestly, someone post this on slashdot.

The URL is http://www.aiplex.com/

Website currently shows 80k hits.... 800k would probably be enough to bring it down.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Sep 2010 @ 6:12am

It's funny to me that they don't seem to really understand how a DoS attack works. It has less to do with bandwidth (usually) and more to do with the server's ability to accept new requests (even computers can only do so many things at once).
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Sep 2010 @ 6:15am

So they do DoS attacks on, say, the Pirate Bay. Big deal, the movies are being transmitted via bittorrent by (possibly) hundreds of different peers.

All they achieve is stopping the distribution of the .torrent files (if they succeed, which, I doubt) on _that_ site. They don't stop the infringement, so what do they hope to achieve? I guess that just the promise of magically stopping the massive file sharing with some poorly thought out plan is enough to get studios to throw some money at them.
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abc gum, 9 Sep 2010 @ 6:17am

Re: They know how much money is there
They might be positioning themselves for the eventual outsourcing of the lucrative presettlement business.

It is inevitable that we all will be receiving poorly written letters and emails suggesting a payment in order to avoid a costly court battle. A big problem for the recipients is figuring out which ones are real.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Sep 2010 @ 6:18am

Re: Seems like a short-term business plan
Isn't it illegal to hire someone to do something illegal?
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Sep 2010 @ 7:55am

we'll see if they like it
@12 yes it is
and in almost every country this is illegal and if they want to get whacked by all means , myself i think this is a trap
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Sep 2010 @ 8:03am

BWAAAHAHAHAH
Sounds about right... I've outsourced software development to India, trust me, if theres one thing they know, it's how to fu*k up systems.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Sep 2010 @ 9:59am

And what they do is legal? Who's the real pirate? All we do is watch a movie or listen to a song. Harmless things. But they react with violence and force. They react with hatred and malice. Who are these guys?
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chris (profile), 9 Sep 2010 @ 11:02am

Re: Re: Seems like a short-term business plan
depends on how much you pay them:

$5000 to have your wife murdered? ILLEGAL
$100 million in no-bid contracts to blackwater? TOTALLY LEGAL
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Girish - Aiplex, 9 Sep 2010 @ 10:36pm

Misinterpretation
My claim with the Editor was pointblank that we go an extramile in identifying the IP addresses & other contact info of such illegal sites & pass such information to the production houses to pursue with the cyber crime police. Further if the govt. provides a permission to cyber police to attack such sites, Aiplex can help the cyber police in providing the technical inputs. That said, one of the common method one can bring down the site is DDOS attack is what was explained. This does not mean that we are doing such illegal activates while we are sending the copyright notices to Infringed sites. We being a seven year old software company & having been understood the cyber law & its consequences, why would we take the risk of doing such unprofessional activity. If some editor has misinterpreted & made a story on that, then i have no comments pls.
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Sep 2010 @ 5:23am

Re: Misinterpretation
The consequences will never be the same!
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Brian, 10 Sep 2010 @ 6:53am

and what about the other web sites on the same hosting box? Screw everyone else who is on that server right? I think someone should DDOS attack them back, if it's so appropriate a response to those who "don't cooperate" with you.
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Girish, 11 Sep 2010 @ 10:28am

I repeat, we are not into such illegal activities of DDOS attacks or anything of such sort..... Piracy is a crime & the sites that encourage the growth the piracy should begin to change their ways of thinking & look at converting themselves to a legal site where there is a immense money which attributes to the betterment of their legal stance in their country. I wish a few of them would agree to my statements & start changing to be a nice citizen. Good luck!!!!
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ervserver (profile), 14 Sep 2010 @ 10:05pm

Indian company
hmmm sounds like the same company that does Dell support
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Concerned User, 30 Sep 2010 @ 10:15am

Re:
But you don't deny that you use DDOS attacks. Even though DDOS attacks are illegal? Further I would question how you manage to use a DDOS attack. Does your company control a botnet, that you utilize to send down the millions of requests needed to take down a site, or is this simply a DOS attack?
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Anonymous Coward, 8 Apr 2011 @ 1:24pm

fuking fake indian ass holes bihari saale kashmir benega pakistan
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