Nokia: We Don't Know Why Criminals Want Our Old Phones

The mystery why cybercriminals want a discontinued Nokia phone isn't getting any clearer. Hackers have been offering up to €25,000 (US$32,413) in undergrounds forums for Nokia 1100 phones made in the company's former factory in Bochum, Germany. The phone can allegedly be hacked so as to facilitate illegal online banking transfers, according to the Dutch company Ultrascan Advanced Global Investigations. Nokia said it doesn't know of an 1100 software problem that would allow call spoofing. The company said that a phone's SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card -- which holds the device's phone number -- has security mechanisms that are separate from the phone itself. Technical details on how the 1100 is being modified are still unknown, said Frank Engelsman of Ultrascan. Meanwhile, a Dutch technology site, portablegear.nl, wrote that it placed a fake advertisement for the particular Nokia 1100 on an online marketplace. People offered as much as €500, offering to immediately come pick up the device.

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/163515/

IFPI Site Under Attack by Pirate Bay Supporters

The website of the music industry lobby group IFPI is suffering from an organized DDoS attack and has been unresponsive for the past few hours. The attack was organized by Pirate Bay supporters who don’t agree with the sentences handed out to the four defendants. There are many ways for people to show that they disagree with the entertainment industry’s crackdown on file-sharing sites. Some choose to become a member of a political party that shares their opinion, others go out on the streets and demonstrate. And then there’s another branch of people - those who launch a counterstrike from behind their desks. In February, when the Pirate Bay trial was in full swing, a group of hackers managed to deface the Swedish IFPI site. Today, the international IFPI site is the new target and is suffering from a DDoS attack. At the time of writing the website is completely inaccessible. The attacks are part of Operation Baylout which also encourages people to send black faxes to the MPAA’s anti-piracy office and movie industry lawyer Monique Wadsted. Thus far, we have no confirmation that any fax machines have been taken down. The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak in a comment: “I feel peoples’ frustration. I hope they do something more permanent instead, like making sure the idiots that give power to the media industry lose their own power. We need to cut out the companies abusing copyright at the expense of society’s well-being. But this is not a permanent fix so it’s just pointless.” Pointless or not, according to the Reg, some 250 hackers are gathering in AnonNet’s IRC channels to discuss their battle strategies and future plans.

Source: http://torrentfreak.com/ifpi-site-under-attack-by-pirate-bay-supporters-090420/

Why Google Is The New Pirate Bay

If the Swedish site shuts down, search engines could become the new starting points for digital pirates. This week has offered a hard lesson for pirates, both water- and Web-based: Keep a low profile and your illicit business can flourish. But draw too much attention, and you're likely to get sniped. On Friday, the trial of the Pirate Bay, the Web's highest-profile source of TV shows, movies and music, came to an end when a Swedish court found the administrators of the site guilty of copyright infringement, sentencing them to a year in prison and more than $3 million in fines. The verdict comes as a surprise to many who assumed the site, which indexes the "tracker" files that allow users to share video and music, was beyond prosecution in its home country of Sweden. And though the sites' owners say they plan to appeal the decision, it may nonetheless lead to the takedown of the Web's most popular index of peer-to-peer downloads. But even if the Pirate Bay sinks, putting an end to file-sharing isn't so simple. Waiting in the wings to absorb the site's audience are dozens of second-string bittorrent tracker sites that have avoided the Pirate Bay's level of notoriety, including Mininova, isoHunt and Demonoid. And according to Ben Edelman, a professor at Harvard's Business School focused on Internet regulation, that longer-tail assortment of piracy outlets means the starting point for finding pirated content has shifted to an even more resilient source: Google. "Google now can and does do what the Pirate Bay has always done," Edelman says. "And if they're prosecuted, they would have much more interesting arguments in their defense."

By searching for pirated music or video, Google users can easily scan a range of lesser-known pirate sites to dig up illicit content. Those looking for the upcoming film X-Men Origins: Wolverine, for instance, can search for "wolverine torrent." The first result is a link to file-sharing site isoHunt, with a torrent tracker file that allows the user to download the full film. In fact, searches for "wolverine torrent" on Google have more than quadrupled since the movie file was first leaked to peer-to-peer networks on April 5, according to Google Trends.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/17/pirate-bay-google-technology-internet-pirate-bay.html?feed=rss_news