BitTorrent anomaly discovered by Cert Poland
Some time ago I was writing about interesting project named YouHaveDownloaded. If it didn't stop you from using torrents, maybe the news coming from Poland's CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) will.
The security experts from CERT have observed an intense activity in BitTorrent network especially in Canada, Russia, China, USA and Australia. The traffic in April 2012 was over 20 times higher then in April 2011. They observed that someone is sending massive amounts of forged data packets.
The specialists couldn't find the real source of this traffic or tell what exactly does it do, but they got few hypothesis. The attacks seems to be targeted at specific BitTorrent swarms sharing Russian movie releases. It is possible that some anti-piracy groups are doing them to “protect” their clients interests. It is obvious that multimedia companies would benefit from this type of attacks. This hypothesis is very probable especially when we have in mind that Microsoft funded a startup called Pirate Pay (More about Pirate Pay HERE).
CERT also notes that this kind of poisoning attacks/anomaly as they call it, may violate cybersecurity law: "In terms of Polish law, European Convention on Cybercrime and U.S. Codes (and probably many other sources of domestic law) legality of process producing the anomaly is questionable..” .
Time will show what is going on in here:)
Anonymity in Bittorrent network
If someone thinks that by downloading files from the BitTorrent network his actions are hidden well, here's a bucket of cold water on his head. There is a new website out there called YouHaveDownloaded, which tracks about 20% of all downloads of BitTorrent. I doesn't only collect data about what and by whom torrents were downloaded down but it also publish the informations.