The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has now confirmed what the United States government said months ago: Canada is a haven for the counterfeiters, [media] pirates and intellectual property thieves of the world.
In a report released Thursday titled “A National Intellectual Property Crime Threat Assessment, 2005-2008,” Canada’s top cops found the number of IP-related crimes occurring in Canada has grown so widespread over the years that the RCMP can no longer keep track.
“Although the RCMP investigated nearly 1,500 cases of IP crime between 2005 and 2008, these numbers are believed to be a fraction of the true IP crime situation in Canada,” reads an excerpt from the report.
The report acknowledges Canada as a “source of pirated DVD and CD media, primarily for domestic consumption.” So at first glance the problem doesn’t appear incredibly widespread; Canadians are pirating material their own use.
But wait, the report goes on.
“However, some investigations have revealed Canada as a source country for pirated media found online, as well as a transit country for various IP-infringing goods,” reads the following paragraph.
There you have it: we aren’t just complicit in piracy, we are the purveyors of it as well.
That might explain why the United States considers media use in Canada to be America’s business. In May, a U.S. District Court judge issued a permanent injunction against Canada-based Isohunt, one of the largest BitTorrent search engines on the Internet.
Read more…
AT&T sent an e-mail to iPad owners Sunday explaining a data breach that occurred on its site and laying much of the blame with the group that discovered the hole.
The e-mail, which was signed by AT&T Chief Privacy Officer Dorothy Attwood, blamed “self-described hackers” for uncovering a hole in the company’s Web site that allowed for the exposure of 114,000 e-mail addresses belonging to iPad owners, according to a copy posted on Boy Genius Report. Among the iPad users who appeared to have been affected were White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, journalist Diane Sawyer, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, movie producer Harvey Weinstein, and New York Times CEO Janet Robinson.
In the e-mail explaining how the breach occurred, Attwood apologized for the breach and said “unauthorized computer ‘hackers’ maliciously exploited a function designed to make your iPad log-in process faster by pre-populating an AT&T authentication page with the email address you used to register your iPad for 3G service”:
The self-described hackers wrote software code to randomly generate numbers that mimicked serial numbers of the AT&T SIM card for iPad–called the integrated circuit card identification (ICC-ID)–and repeatedly queried an AT&T web address. When a number generated by the hackers matched an actual ICC-ID, the authentication page log-in screen was returned to the hackers with the email address associated with the ICC-ID already populated on the log-in screen.
The hackers deliberately went to great efforts with a random program to extract possible ICC-IDs and capture customer email addresses. They then put together a list of these emails and distributed it for their own publicity.
Read more…
A proposed US congressional bill to regulate the collection of personal data is being almost universally panned, with privacy advocates arguing it’s inadequate and pro-business groups saying it goes too far.
The draft legislation (PDF) would for the first time impose national standards on how companies collect IP addresses, viewer history, and other potentially sensitive data from individuals. It would apply to websites and offline operations as well.
In its current form, it would apply to any business or non-profit organization that collects personal information from at least 5,000 individuals in a given year. In a nod to privacy advocates, groups would be required to get individuals’ consent before storing names, email addresses, and other data. But acquiring that consent could be as simple as adding a statement to a website, a policy that’s anathema to many civil-liberties boosters because it’s viewed as opt-out rather than opt-in.
Some privacy advocates also worry that the half-hearted restrictions will preempt many state laws that do a much better job of controlling the collection of personal data.
Read more…
An international cybercrime centre will be able to revoke domain names and IP addresses under new proposals by European governments.
The EU Council of Ministers announced the plan yesterday. They want a new body, possibly based at Europol, the EU police agency, to take on an array of tasks to combat cybercrime.
The most eye-catching of the potential centre’s briefly-described roles will be to “adopt a common approach in the fight against cybercrime internationally, particularly in relation to the revocation of domain names and IP addresses”, the Council of Ministers suggested.
They called on the European Commission to work on the plan, and to draw up more detailed proposals covering the aim, scope and financing of a new centre.
In the UK, an initiative to revoke domain names suspected of being used for cybercrime is already being run by Nominet, the not-for-profit private company that runs the .uk registry. In December, working in cooperation with police, it pulled the plug on 1,200 allegedly dodgy domains.
Read more…
Researchers have devised a way to monitor BitTorrent users over long stretches of time, a feat that allows them to map the internet addresses of individuals and track the content they are sending and receiving.
In a paper presented earlier this week at the Usenix Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats, the researchers demonstrated how they used the technique to continuously spy on BitTorrent users for 103 days. They collected 148 million IP addresses and identified 2 billion copies of downloads, many of them copyrighted.
The researchers, from the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control, also identified the IP addresses where much of the content originated. They discovered the the vast majority of the material on BitTorrent started with a relatively small number of individuals.
“We do not claim that it is easy to stop those content providers from injecting content into BitTorrent,” they wrote. “However, it is striking that such a small number of content providers triggers billions of downloads. Therefore, it is surprising that the anti-piracy groups try to stop millions of downloaders instead of a handful of content providers.”
Read more…
An IP dome camera may be more costly than other security surveillance alternatives but if you understand how it works, you
More malware is now coming out of China than from any other country, according to a new report from Symantec.
The United States still leads the world in the number of malware attacks sent from mail servers. Symantec’s report (PDF) found U.S. mail servers responsible for distributing 36.6 percent of all global malware in March, followed by China at 17.8 percent and Romania at 16.5 percent.
Symantec captured these results by analyzing the IP addresses of sending mail servers. The company uncovered a large amount of malware from the United States in large part because many Web-based e-mail services, such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail, are hosted in the U.S.
But analyzing the source of malware based on the mail servers doesn’t tell the full picture as the sender can use any Web-based e-mail account. By checking the actual sender’s IP address found in the e-mail’s header, Symantec found individuals in China responsible for 28.2 percent of malware, Romania for 21.1 percent, and the U.S. for 13.8 percent. Overall, the analysis discovered that most of the attacks coming from mail services in North American actually stem from other regions, including Asia, Europe, and Africa.
Read more…
Tracing IP addresses is a fundamental skill for online investigations. Several resources are available on the Internet to assist in this process. Several online resources for doing your basic IP identification include:
ARIN – American Registry of Internet Numbers
ARIN is a Regional Internet Registry (RIR) that provides services related to the technical coordination and management of Internet number resources in its respective service region. The ARIN service region includes Canada, many Caribbean and North Atlantic islands, and the United States.
Use the “Search Whois” function at https://www.arin.net/index.html to obtain IP registration information.
Sam Spade
Sam Spade has been in use as a tool for obtaining domain registration information for years. It has a simple Google like interface where you enter an IP address or a domain name.
http://samspade.org/
DNS Stuff
This is another website that has been around for a number of years. This website offers both free and pay for option for assisting in the identification IP addresses and other online information.
http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/tools/
Read more…
The High Court has ordered the publishers of the Wikipedia user-generated encyclopaedia to reveal information which could identify a contributor in a blackmail case involving an unnamed famous businesswoman.
The Wikimedia Foundation said that it would not help to identify the user unless a court order was made, but that if the Court ordered it to release the information it would.
The businesswoman, known as G, claims to be the subject of a blackmail plot and the victim of the publishing in a Wikipedia entry of private and confidential information about her and her young child.
One of G’s companies is in dispute with a person whom she believes is also behind a smear campaign against her. An anonymous letter she received appeared to be a threat to claim that her expenses claims amounted to theft. Another anonymous letter disclosed the information that was later published on the Wikipedia page.
G suspects that the same person is behind the letters, the business dispute, the Wikipedia entry and attempts to sell the private information to newspapers.
Read more…
The hackers who leaked more than 1,000 emails from one of the top climate research centers may have used an open proxy to cover their tracks, but that doesn’t mean authorities can’t figure out who they are.
Rob Graham, CEO of penetration testing firm Errata Security, said his analysis suggests that the hackers used three open proxies when they posted a 61 MB Zip file of email belonging to staff at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. CRU officials say they’ve brought in police to assist in their investigation into the leak of the internal documents without permission.
Open proxies have long been a favorite of people trying to hide their online identities. By funneling web requests through the third-party, websites see only the IP address of the proxy, rather than the IP address where the request is actually being made. This post by the hackers on ClimateAudit was made using an open proxy located in Russia, while another of their posts used a proxy located in Saudi Arabia.
CRU representatives have said the hackers used a Turkish IP address when breaching CRU security and posting the Zip file on its servers. One would presume its an open proxy as well.
Read more…
IP Addresses have long been used in device fingerprinting solutions, but their utility has been hit-and-miss due to differences in how groups of IP addresses are managed. As a result, solutions relying on the IP address for device identification generally experience high false positive rates; this is especially true in cases where the same IP address has been issued to different end users over time.
Based on data iovation has collected from performing over two billion device identification requests, we
News Web sites in China, complying with secret government orders, are requiring that new users log on under their true identities to post comments, a shift in policy that the country’s Internet users and media have fiercely opposed in the past.
Until recently, users could weigh in on news items on many of the affected sites more anonymously, often without registering at all, though the sites were obligated to screen all posts, and the posts could still be traced via Internet protocol addresses.
But in early August, without notification of a change, news portals like Sina, Netease, Sohu and scores of other sites began asking unregistered users to sign in under their real names and identification numbers, said top editors at two of the major portals affected. A Sina staff member also confirmed the change.
The editors said the sites were putting into effect a confidential directive issued in late July by the State Council Information Office, one of the main government bodies responsible for supervising the Internet in China.
Read more…
