Archive for May, 2011

Fast Pass TV Shuts Down After Arrest

Posted: May 30, 2011 in Cyber Crime, Downloads, P2P
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The popular video streaming site “Fast Pass TV” shut down earlier this week following the arrest of one of the site’s alleged operators. The site itself didn’t host any copyrighted content but indexed videos hosted on third-party sites. The operator has been released on bail pending inquiries.

For quite a few years the Hollywood-funded Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) has been tipping-off the UK police on the activities of file-sharing websites and their operators.

This has resulted in the arrests of several site admins including those from TV-Links and BitTorrent site FileSoup.

A few days ago a FACT investigation led to another arrest. A 26-year old man was arrested Wednesday with police reportedly seizing £83,000 and computer equipment following a raid in Derry, Northern Ireland.

After being questioned the man was released on bail, a very similar situation to other FACT-assisted arrests we’ve seen over the years. Other than that, the police haven’t released any information on the site in question or the exact nature of any alleged offenses.

However, after some digging TorrentFreak can with near certainty conclude that the man in question is connected to the video streaming website “Fast Pass TV”. The site’s Twitter account – which was recently deleted – an associated email address and various other trails all point to a man (P. M.) in Derry, Northern Ireland.

Another source later confirmed that the man from Derry is indeed the operator of “Fast Pass TV.”

The website in question did not store any video material but merely linked to third party sites. “Fast Pass TV does not host, store, or distribute any of the videos listed on the site and only link to user submitted content that is freely available on the Internet,” it stated on the website.

Fastpasstv.eu went offline around the time of the arrest leaving 68,287 registered members and hundreds of thousands of daily visitors in the dark. Without official confirmation from the authorities we can’t conclude that Fastpasstv.eu was the primary site FACT was after, but all signs point in that direction.

The arrest and the involvement of FACT are interesting, since the UK police have failed to convict any of the previously arrested operators of file-sharing or streaming sites. Most relevant to this case is the previous action against TV-Links.co.uk, a site which operated a service comparable to that offered by Fastpasstv.eu.

Legal action was taken against TV-Links.co.uk but eventually its operators won their lengthy trial. This set a precedent at least in the UK/European Union that under certain conditions these website owners do not do anything illegal. According to Section 17 of the European Commerce Directive, TV-Links was seen as a conduit of information and was afforded a complete defense in criminal proceedings for linking to other websites.

Whether the police are going to walk down the same path again, or whether the site operator was arrested for an unrelated crime is something the future will tell. However, it appears that Fastpasstv.eu has already made a comeback as fastpasstv.ms, where the recent seizures are also referenced. TorrentFreak could not verify the validity of the new site.

For more news have a look at torrentfreak The place where breaking news, BitTorrent and copyright collide

Irish Teen Hacker Scares Microsoft Enough to Land Him a Job

Posted: May 28, 2011 in Cyber Crime, Hacking, In The News, Microsoft
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What’s the best way to land a programmer’s job at Microsoft? Well, there’s the standard method of going to school for computer science, succeeding admirably, creating programs of your own and then applying and hoping you get the nod.

Then there’s the slightly less orthodox method employed occasionally by young and ambitious hackers.

In this case, a 14-year-old Irish hacker managed to break into the online servers for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 last month and start a phishing scam that tried to get other players to divulge personal information.

The hack came right in the middle of the crippling hack attack that took down the entire Playstation Network, and it scared Microsoft enough to issue worldwide alter for the scam.

So now that the perpetrator has been outed as a 14-year-old geek living with his parents, what’s Microsoft’s response?

Irish Central reports:

[Managing Director of Microsoft Ireland Paul] Rellis revealed that Microsoft planned to work with the Dublin teenager to develop his talent for legitimate purposes.

So let that be a lesson, hackers. If you start young enough and hack with enough skill, you can trade “being sued in court” for “getting a sweet job.”

This was first posted on www.seattleweekly.com

 

Is Facebook’s ‘Like’ button spying on you?

Posted: May 22, 2011 in Facebook, Hacking, In The News
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The Facebook “Like” and Twitter “Tweet” buttons that appear on so many websites do a lot more than just help you share content with friends

The ubiquitous Facebook “Like” and Twitter “Tweet” buttons let web users share content with their friends and followers, but, unbeknownst to most, they also let the social-media sites track users — even when people don’t click on them, according to a study done for The Wall Street Journal. Here, a guide to the buttons, and the privacy concerns they raise:

What do these buttons do?
Their primary function is to let users share items from across the web with their social networks. But they also place “cookies” on a user’s computer, that allow Facebook and Twitter to know when a user visits a specific page. If you visit any web page with a “Like” button on it (like this one), Facebook knows about it. And the buttons “could link users’ browsing habits to their social-networking profile, which often contains their name,” says Amir Efrati in The Wall Street Journal.

And it tracks you even if you don’t click the buttons?
Yes. As long as you’ve logged into Facebook or Twitter once in the past month, your data is collected, even if you don’t click the button. The tracking stops only when a user “explicitly logs out of their Facebook or Twitter accounts,” says Efrati in the Journal.

How common are these widgets now?
The Facebook and Twitter buttons “have been added to millions of web pages in the past year,” says Efrati. Facebook’s widget appears on one-third of the 1,000 most-visited websites in the world, while buttons from Google and Twitter are on one-quarter and one-fifth of those sites, respectively.

Is Facebook using this data?
Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other “widget-makers” say they don’t use the data to track users. And they say that the data is “anonymized” so that it can’t be traced back to specific users. Facebook says it only uses the data to power targeted ads. The social network stores the data for three months, which is “substantially longer than the two weeks Google stores similar information,” says Lee Mathews at Geek.com. Twitter says it doesn’t use the data and deletes it “quickly.”

What can be done to minimize this tracking?
“If you’re worried” about it, you should “log out of these sites after you’re done checking your email, tweeting, poking, or what have you,” says Kashmir Hill in Forbes. “Yeah, you’ll have to re-enter your password more often,” says Linda Sharps at The Stir, “but it seems like you can have either convenience or privacy these days — not both.”

First posted on theweek.com

Nintendo Boss Sent Bricks In DRM Protest

Posted: May 18, 2011 in Cyber Crime, Geek Stuff, In The News
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Controversy over Nintendos’s new Terms of Service (TOS) for its 3DS is heating up, particularly over the fact that the company is threatening to remotely destroy any devices that are found to be modified.

Nintendo says that “any existing or future unauthorized technical modification of the hardware or software of your Nintendo 3DS System, or the use of an unauthorized device in connection with your system, will render the system permanently unplayable.”

The folks over at Defective By Design (DBD) are very disappointed by the stance taken by Nintendo and are running a campaign to get the company to reverse its decision.

For every donation they receive, DBD are sending large ‘bricks’ to Reggie Fils-Aime, President and COO of Nintendo of America, which are meant to represent the usefulness of modified 3DS consoles after Nintendo makes good on their threat.

For those who don’t want to send bricks, there is another and arguably more effective protest that costs much less money – don’t buy a 3DS.

This post is from the News Bits section of TorrentFreak where we present stories from around the web in a concise summary format. Full TorrentFreak articles can be found here. If you have a tip please let us know. News Bits have their very own RSS feed

HACKED Fox.com

Posted: May 12, 2011 in Cyber Crime, Geek Stuff, Hacking, In The News
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Hackers have broken into a Fox.com extranet site, designed as a repository of research statistics, programming details and ratings for clients and affiliates, and stolen the emails and passwords for hundreds of Fox Broadcasting employees.

The group, which calls itself Lulz Security, then used that information to alter the LinkedIn accounts of more than a dozen Fox sales employees, tweeting each one on its @LulzSec twitter account. It also posted the trove online, saying, ‘We invite the Internet to ravage the following list of emails and passwords (from a database within Fox.com) – Facebook, MySpace, PayPal, whatever you can get your hands on. Take from them everything. Remember to proxy up, or tunnel like a pro!”

The security breach apparently took place more than a week ago, as Fox Broadcasting alerted its users on April 29th that it had been hacked and urged them to change their passwords.

Last week, the hacker group published personal information for thousands of contestants on Fox’s “X Factor.” Fox told contestants that it was working with federal authorities.

I’ve reached out to Fox for comment and will update when I hear back.

UPDATE: A Fox Broadcasting spokeswoman offers an official comment: “About two weeks ago, we learned that computer hackers illegally accessed fox.com and obtained a database file that contained usernames and passwords used to access a Fox extranet site. We took immediate steps to stop the illegal intrusion, have notified all users who were affected and are working with law enforcement.”

Cracking The Credit Card Code

Posted: May 7, 2011 in Cyber Crime, Geek Stuff, Hacking, How to...., Tutorial
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For other cool stuff have a look at http://www.mint.com/blog

Who Tweeted the Raid on Bin Laden and Didn’t Know It?

Posted: May 2, 2011 in General, In The News, twitter
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 Yesterday Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual on Twitter) was just a “an IT consultant taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains”, specifically Abbottabad, northern Pakistan.

The IT contractor and graduate of Preston University (which would account for his excellent British-sounding English) also says he’s a ‘startup specialist’ on his LinkedIn profile.

But today he will become known as the guy who, while live-tweeting a series of helicopter flypasts and explosion, unwittingly covered the US forces helicopter raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound. And he knows it. Here’s a selection of his Tweets:

Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).
Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter :-/
A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S
@m0hcin all silent after the blast, but a friend heard it 6 km away too… the helicopter is gone too.
@m0hcin http://bit.ly/ljB6p6 seems like my giant swatter worked !
@m0hcin the few people online at this time of the night are saying one of the copters was not Pakistani…
RT @han3yy: OMG :S Bomb Blasts in Abbottabad.. I hope everyone is fine :(
Since taliban (probably) don’t have helicpoters, and since they’re saying it was not “ours”, so must be a complicated situation #abbottabad
The abbottabad helicopter/UFO was shot down near the Bilal Town area, and there’s report of a flash. People saying it could be a drone.
@wqs figures, if they have the right to shoot planes flying over the president house, the must have the same instructions for PMA
@smedica people are saying it was not a technical fault and it was shot down. I heard it CIRCLE 3-4 times above, sounded purposeful.
@tahirakram very likely – but it was too noisy to be a spy craft, or, a very poor spy craft it was.
Here’s the location of the Abbottabad crash according to some people >>> http://on.fb.me/khjf34
Two helicpoters, one down, could actually be the training accident scenario they’re saying it was >> http://bit.ly/ioGE6O
and now I feel I must apologize to the pilot about the swatter tweets :-/
And now, a plane flying over Abbottabad…
Interesting rumors in the otherwise uneventful Abbottabad air today
Report from a taxi driver: The army has cordoned off the crash area and is conducting door-to-door search in the surrounding
@kursed What really happened doesn’t matter if there is an official story behind it that 99.999% of the world would believe
@kursed Another rumor: two copters that followed the crashed one were foreign Cobras – and got away
Report from a sweeper: A family also died in the crash, and one of the helicopter riders got away and is now being searched for.
@kursed Well, there were at least two copters last night, I heard one but a friend heard two, for 15-20 minutes.
@kursed I think I should take out my big blower to blow the fog of war away and see the clearer picture.
RT @ISuckBigTime: Osama Bin Laden killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan.: ISI has confirmed it << Uh oh, there goes the neighborhood :-/
I need to sleep, but Osama had to pick this day to die :-/
Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.
and here come the mails from the mainstream media… *sigh*
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