The entertainment industry must be celebrating what may be a symbolic victory after four Pirate Bay guys were found guilty by a Stockholm court this morning “of being accessories to copyright infringement”, according to the local.
A server seized by the Swedish Police in a 2006 raid of The Pirate Bay’s premises has found a new home - The National Museum of Science and Technology, Sweden.
Read the museum’s press release translated by Google:
Read a press release translated by Google.
In a pretty eventful halfweek, which saw the passage of the IPRED law in Sweden, a resulting drop in internet traffic to an increased demand for anonymizers, the Police have began raiding suspected fil sharers. This raid was reportedly a part of an international sting operation that involved raids in Britian, Belgium, Netherlands and Spain.
Following the passage of the IPRED law in Sweden a few days ago, there’s been an increased demand for anonymizing services. The Pirate Bay has for instance started its own anonymizing service called IPREDator (you get the drift). Other anonymizers are also offering IPRED protection.
On April 1 Sweden passed the EU directive called IPRED (Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive) into law. That same day, internet traffic dropped by 30% according The Local, an online newspaper. The law will allow courts to order ISPs to hand over information that identify suspected illegal file sharers. The belief is that commercial infractions of intellectual property law within the EU will eventually be criminalised.
F-Secure has published the IT Security Threat summary for the second half of 2008.
Summary:
Growth in amounts of malicious software
Growth in infections
Growth in the number of botnets
Growth in criminal profits
Call for growth in punishment
Highlights:
On Botnets infections
During 2008 our Response Lab conducted a small research project focusing on approximately 60 orphaned botnets. Listening to the communication attempts [...]
The Register has reported that an online payment service mycheckfree.com has lost control of at least two of its domains to a crime gang believed to be based in Eastern Europe.
Possible explanation?
It’s also unclear how the culprits managed to hijack the domains. While security experts say DNS poisoning wasn’t out of the question, the more [...]
Aiming to take the fight to the bot herders, a company - SRI International - has released a tool called BotHunter. It is free. The software works by monitoring the communication between compromised hosts on a corporate network and bot-herding computers also known as command & control centres.
BotHunter uses what sounds more like heuristic methods and processes (where detection is based on patterns) or than signatures (where detection is based on known attacks). This is how it works:
In its publication titled Technology-Induced Challenges in Privacy and Data Protection in Europe, ENISA (European Network And Information Security Agency) made 13 recommendations aimed at taking personal data protection more seriously than it has been in the past. I’m particularly interested in recommendations 5 and 9.
Symantec has published a survey - Underground Economy - detailing the activities of cyber criminals who through astute business models have managed to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in a year. The cost to victims of these activities easily runs into billions of dollars. What do they sell?
