France Suspends 3 Strikes Monitoring Following Data Breach

from the oops dept

Tue, May 17th 2011 7:07pm — Mike Masnick

Over the weekend, TorrentFreak reported that the company that French "three strikes and you're off the internet" agency Hadopi had hired to help it track down infringers, Trident Media Guard, had been hacked, though, in reality it appears to be much more of a simple data breach caused by TMG poor setup. The breach left open a lot of details of the tracking system, including IP addresses linked to the whole 3 strikes process. In response, it appears that Hadopi has "temporarily suspended" its work with TMG, perhaps to measure the damage and see if it can actually learn to lock down its computers. In the meantime, however, as TorrentFreak points out, there are no other providers doing this monitoring -- meaning that (at least for a little while), it appears 3 strikes monitoring has stopped in France.

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Filed Under: breach, copyright, france, monitoring
Companies: hadopi, triton media group

10 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 17 May 2011 @ 7:44pm

So, now there will be a drop in music sales?
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Chris in Utah (profile), 17 May 2011 @ 8:18pm

I wonder who the PR guys are over at Anonymous because if they keep up the track record (ClimateGate, PS3 & This) they may be able to set up an donation pools like kickstarter for future projects.
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- Jay (profile), 17 May 2011 @ 9:05pm
  
  Re:
  Anonymous has had a fight recently. The AnonOps that we've known about were kicked out of the channel by one of their own. You might not hear too much from them until much later.
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  - Anonymous Coward, 17 May 2011 @ 9:23pm
    
    Re: Re:
    IRC wars are always fun. They're very political in nature. Being an op of a large channel offers incredible intelligence over how things really work too. It's almost like being a (miniature) politician. The IRC networks are full of other people who want power over those channels and start all sorts of trolling organizations that try to organize all sorts of sophisticated attempts to circumvent your bans and spam the channel with advertisements and/or get ops if possible. They often have their own trolling channels as well where they organize and discuss their next attacks. and Efnet (or other) ops (people who op the whole Efnet server, not just a single channel) also try to kick them off their servers but they find ways to get back into the servers and into the channels. They have entire organizations of 'hackers' that are dedicated to just hacking channels, websites, DDOSing websites, threatening to DDOS down a (channel or other) website if not allowed in a channel, etc... They try to DDOS your Internet connection, the internet connections of other ops in the channel, their bots and the servers that host those bots, etc... and they can, and do, take down and hack popular websites too. Preventing them from flooding your channel with spam is no easy task.
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Richard (profile), 18 May 2011 @ 2:03am

Excuse
So now anyone who rece3ives a letter can say "I didn't do it , I was hacked" and Hadopi can really tell them "you need to improve your security" with a straight face.
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Blatant Coward (profile), 18 May 2011 @ 2:08am

One clear course of action
While Hadopi evaluates, obviously the only thing they can do is remove all of France from Internet access. This is the only way to protect the children. Besides the Internet is full of things that are not from France anyway, who needs it.
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Anonymous Coward, 18 May 2011 @ 2:45am

why suspend them? afraid of the people finding out some "special" ip address that has more than 3 strikes but still connected to the internet and start wondering who own those ip?
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Michael Lockyear, 18 May 2011 @ 4:48am

Dust of the guillontine
What we really need a 3-strike rule for stupidity.

If the system had worked as intended "file-sharing abusers" would have been carted off to a judge after 3 warnings. The information from Trident MediaGuard would have been presented as reliable information from a safe and secure system...

Ironically, under the Hadopi laws internet users who fail to secure their connections can be punished for the acts of others.

Also ironic is that this is the third strike for Hadopi:
1 - They pirated their logo font
2 - Their website was turned into a Pirate Bay search engine
3 - The company licensed to spy on p2p users failed to secure their own systems.

...and lets not forget this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/08/nicolas-sarkozy-french-pr_n_313723.html

By rights the French government should be banned from the internet!
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- Cory Vanderyacht, 19 May 2011 @ 2:07pm
  
  Re: Dust of the guillontine
  But....but....this law is to punish pirates, not innocent hacked gov't agencies. The PIRATES!
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Anonymous Coward, 18 May 2011 @ 5:07am

A quick read through the (limited) technical analysis...
...suggests that TMG has been completely 0wned and thus that NO data in its possession can be trusted. It will be interesting to see whether or not subsequent releases of data/code/etc. from their site confirm that.
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