Accusation of ID theft by file-sharing
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A Seattle man has been arrested in what the Justice Department described as its first case against someone accused of using file-sharing digital data to commit identity theft.
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The men behind one of the most popular file-sharing sites in the world are charged copyright offences.
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Identity theft, thanks mainly to the growth of the Internet, is epidemic. Can it be stopped?
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LOS ANGELES  - File-swappers beware. Illegally downloading movies can now get you sued. Like the recording companies, movie studios are fed up with computer users sharing unauthorized copies of
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The drives from LaCie, use biometrics to restrict access to data and will not work if they've been removed from the case and are plugged into another machine.
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Things just aren&#39;t going well for Timothy Scott Short. Just days after a pair of tech support calls he made to printer manufacturer Digimarc&#160;resulted in his arrest, he now finds himself on the receiving end of a data breach with his Social Security number and birthdate accidentally made public via the federal court&#39;s Electronic Case Files (ECF) system.It&#39;s an ironic development, because Short, 33, was arrested in connection with the Oct. 5 theft of a Missouri Department of Revenue printer and a PC containing data on as many as 500 state residents.Short&#39;s personal information was discovered by the IDG News Service, listed on a court document called a Criminal Case Cover Sheet, which was publicly available to users of the ECF system. Normally, this document should only be accessible to those involved in the case, but it appears to have been inadvertently made public, according to a clerk with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, who asked not to be identified because she was not authorized to speak with the press. &quot;It&#39;s something on our side,&quot; she said, adding that technical staff is now looking into the problem.The U.S. Judicial Conference, which sets policy for U.S. courts, has said that this kind of information should be removed from publicly available electronic court records, but actually removing all the sensitive information has proved difficult.&quot;If you went online to various court systems, you could find social security numbers of many individuals,&quot; said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy with the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. &quot;It&#39;s a really, really difficult question to answer, just because you&#39;re dealing with so many jurisdictions.&quot;Social Security numbers are the building blocks of identity theft crime because they can be used to secure credit cards. &quot;Any time you are placing Social Security numbers online, your are subjecting that person to identity theft,&quot; Stephens said.With the push to make public documents available online, other government databases have had similar problems. Earlier this year, the states of California and Colorado were forced to take their Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) databases offline after privacy advocates pointed out that the Social Security numbers and other data they contained could be misused by identity thieves.Short, however, may have bigger problems to worry about. He&#39;s facing $250,000 in fines and 10 years in prison on charges of possession of &quot;document-making implements&quot; in connection with the theft. He was arrested after U.S. Secret Service Special Agent John Bush recognized his voice in calls placed to a tech support line of the company that makes the stolen printer.&#160;
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Network attacks using stolen IDs result in substantial damages, according to an analysis of federally prosecuted cases.
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Controls not enough The Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) has taken action against "a high profile training company" for allowing its network to be used for file sharing.â¦
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The BPI, the UK record industryâs trade association, is targeting people who make their music collection available on the internet, illegally, for other web users to share.
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(InfoWorld) - The personal details of thousands of mostly U.S.-based PC users have been discovered stashed on a server located in France, another indication of use of the Internet to collect personal data on a vast scale. The Web page, which was live as of Monday morning, does not contain financial details of the users. But other Web pages associated with the same domain indicate the site could be connected to a group of hackers based in the Middle East known for their involvement in other Internet financial crime as well as defacing Web sites, said Chris Boyd, research manager for FaceTime Communications Inc., a security company. He posted more details on a company blog . The ISP (Internet service provider) that hosts the page has been contacted, Boyd said. The data appears to have been collected in April 2006, according to timestamps in the file, and includes the full names of people, their address and their IP address. Also included are the names of the Web sites from which the details were apparently collected. The names of those Web sites, most of which are now not active, appear to offer a freebie, with names such as www.likefreestuff.com and www.freebgift.com. The offer of a free gift is often made in exchange for data, Boyd said. There's nothing illegal about collecting data that users voluntarily submit. Likewise, the storing of personal details for marketing purposes is also not illegal. But leaving those details open on a server could violate European or U.S. data protection laws. It's not clear how that data on the French server is being used, but various hackers forums are aware it has been exposed, Boyd said. The e-mail addresses could immediately be used to send spam, while the addresses of the users could potentially be used for identity fraud. Research into the domain name hosting the data has also turned up clues that it may be connected to well-known hacking groups, he said. The server the domain is hosted on also hosts nearly 24,000 other domain names, another indication of possibly either phishing or other scam activity, Boyd said. One page on the same server contains a hacking tool that can be used for a variety of other nefarious activity, such as building custom Web pages with exploit code. The tool, called King IE Exploiter, is an application that can be used to find malicious software that can be incorporated into malicious Web pages, Boyd said. The application has been linked with Trojan horse programs aimed at stealing bank details and other malware that sends spam, he said. Interestingly, when King IE Exploiter starts running, it lists several usernames of hackers, Boyd said. "They're got quite a history for being known for all sort of elaborate scams and attacks," he said. Those attacks include a worm found two years ago that installed a fake BitTorrent client on targeted computers that distributed large video files. The users whose data is now circulating on the Internet in this incident may be less protected that other victims of large data breaches. In the U.S., some states have laws where businesses must contact those affected by a loss of data. However, user may be unaware how their data is now circulating or is used if it was collected by scammers, Boyd said. "It is quite worrying," Boyd said. "Obviously, they are quite happily gathering up all of this information."
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The proprietors of the P2P file-sharing program LimeWire, who were sued last August by a coalition of the major names in the recording industry, has filed a countersuit in the U.S. District Court in New York, claiming that the RIAA is using its copyrights over recorded works as a weapon.
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Switzerland has warned a company that tracks file sharers for copyright violations that its tactics violate the country&#39;s telecommunication law.Logistep, which supplies information on suspected file sharers to law firms around the world for use in copyright violation cases, has until Feb. 9 to respond to the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC), said Marc Schaefer, the agency&#39;s legal advisor.Under Swiss law, the identity of a subscriber to an ISP (Internet service provider) can only be revealed during the course of a criminal case, not a civil one, Schaefer said.&#160;The IP (Internet Protocol) address&#160;of a computer controlled by the subscriber is considered &quot;personal&quot; information.In order to try to claim damages from people suspected of trading songs or movies, Logistep has asked Swiss prosecutors to open criminal cases, Schaefer said. As the criminal cases progresses, Logistep receives information from prosecutors that identifies the file sharer.Logistep then initiates a civil case against the file sharer while the criminal case is ongoing. Prosecutors usually drop the criminal case against the person, Schaefer said.By starting a criminal case &quot;to obtain the identity behind an IP address ... they just found a way to avoid the telecommunication law,&quot; Schaefer said. &quot;Therefore, we told Logistep to stop their work until there is a legal basis which allows such an identification.&quot;The FDPIC&#39;s recommended to Logistep to stop the practice, but is prepared to take the matter to court, Schaefer said. Logistep would be in the clear if they pursued a civil case after the criminal one is complete, he said.Logistep has issued a statement contending an IP address is not personal information. Company officials could not be reached Friday.An IP address can indicate the location of a computer but not necessarily who is using it. Several people could share the same computer, which would have one IP address. But ISPs, as well as wireless routers used in home, can also dynamically assign IP addresses, which adds further ambiguity regarding who is using the computer and who may be responsible for illegally activity conducted on the PC.That means the person paying the bill for the Internet service may end up as the target of the civil proceeding rather than the offender, adding another worrying factor into the lawsuits, Schaefer said.On its Web site, Logistep said it can compile a history of illegal files shared by someone, even if encryption or proxy servers are used to mask the sharing.The row comes amid growing concerns over how personal data is collected and retained in Europe.On Monday, a top European data protection official, Peter Schaar, said at a European Parliament hearing that an IP address should be considered personal information since it can be used to identify people.Schaar is chairman of the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, which is looking at personal data and privacy issues, such as what kind of data search engines retain. A report is scheduled for release by April.Also earlier this week, privacy activists claimed victory over music and content industry lobbyists concerning a report issued by the European Parliament&#39;s Committee on Culture and Education.Struck out of the report was a suggestion that ISPs should monitor content and ban users for suspected copyright infringement, wrote Danny O&#39;Brien, international outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which lobbied against the suggestion as well as others.The report, entitled Cultural Industries in Europe, will be used to make recommendations to European Union countries on intellectual property and other issues.&#160;
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A British court has ordered Internet service providers to identify 28 people who are allegedly downloading music illegally. The order comes at the request of the British Phonographic Association (BPI), a music industry trade association.
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Contrary to messages from the music industry, not all file sharing rips off artists. Weed, a peer-to-peer file sharing program, provides a way for people to share music and pay artists. By Katie Dean.
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A spouse and a peer-to-peer file-sharing program appear to be at the center of a data breach that exposed information on 17,000 Pfizer employees -- and maybe other individuals as well. Investigators would like to know why it took the company six weeks to reveal the problem.
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WASHINGTON -- The FBI seized computers, software, and equipment as part of an investigation into illegal sharing of copyrighted movies, music, and games over an Internet ''peer-to-peer&quot; network, Attorney General John Ashcroft said yesterday.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft is suing a group of hackers who apparently gained access to the company's proprietary source code, creating a program that wipes media files clean of file-sharing restrictions. The suit, which Microsoft filed last Friday in a district court in Seattle, Washington, gives only a nickname for the ringleader, "viodentia," who is one of 10 "John Does" whom Microsoft believes are responsible for breaking its Windows Media Digital Rights Management (DRM) software. Last month, a program calledÂ FairUse4WM surfacedÂ that removed the DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology from Windows Media 10 and 11 files. Many major download services, such as Napster, use Windows DRM, and its removal would allow the files to be copied without restriction or uploaded to file-sharing networks. Microsoft is suing for copyright infringement, since FairUse4WM uses code from the company's Windows Media software development kit version 9.5, a toolset used by software developers to build applications. Microsoft said the hackers have caused it more than $75,000 in losses. It is seeking a permanent injunction against the defendants and compensation. In a separate document filed with the court, Microsoft said the defendants have gone to substantial lengths to hide their identities. It asked for extra time to issue subpoenas to e-mail service providers, to track down some e-mail addresses linked to the individuals, to help it to identify them. The hackers have proved enduring foes for Microsoft. Soon after FairUse4WM was released, Microsoft issued an update to its DRM software, making the hacking program ineffective. The hackers responded less than a day later by updating FairUse4WM again. Their efforts are unlikely to affect the growth of legitimate download services, however, since content providers are aware that no DRM is unbreakable, analysts said. "I think in the long term it's not going to deal Microsoft any crushing blow, but it's certainly an irritant for them," said Jonathan Arber, research analyst for Ovum in London. Technology companies will have to make it too hard for hackers to break the DRM, a leap that could be difficult considering any update to the DRM technology would still have to be compatible with hardware in the market, said Paul Jackson, principal analyst at Forrester Research. Additionally, frequent software updates tend to alienate users, he said. "Itâs a question of highly determined hackers desperate to prove their moxie, versus a corporation that can't release updates every 10 minutes because that annoys people," Jackson said.