Josh Wieder

Over the last few weeks, a botnet has been mass-uploading a specific package of what appears to be malware (I haven't had time to look at the payload itself yet). Cleverly, the person(s) behind this effort have appeared to scrape filenames from titles that have already been pirated by popular uploaders. Stupidly, each download uses an obviously fraudulent filesize of 8.04MB. Videogames have not been that small for decades. This mistake would have been less obvious if not for the fact that the same user account - halfax - has uploaded dozens and dozens of games with the exact same filesize. Adding to the obvious fraud behind this effort is the number of nodes sharing these bad files. A screenshot of the current front page of the Games listing for TPB shows the disparity in the number of Seeders and Leachers between files shared by actual pirates and those shared by "halfax": Notice how, although there is variation in the number of seeders and leechers, the varia...

Until the site went off line some 35 hours ago, torrent distribution site Kickass Torrents was wide ly be lieved to be the most popu lar torrent site on the internet, having surpassed the  long-troub led Pirate Bay in traffic years ago.  Kickass Torrents  was taken off line after the arrest of Ukrainian  Artem Vaulin  in Po land , who  law enforcement are accusing of using the site to  profit from copyright infringement. Copies of a US Federa l  crimina l comp laint brought against Vau lin in the Northern District of I l linois revea l an interesting connection with another incredib ly controversia l  investigation: the case brought against Ross U lbricht for the now-famous Si lk Road website. The connection between the  Kickass Torrents  investigation and the Si lk Road investigation comes in the form of a sing le individua l: Home land Security Investigator  Jared Der-Yeghiayan. The Kickass Torrents crimina l comp laint is...

    Several days ago I noticed that several Comcast / Xfinity residential internet connections throughout the Southeastern US were unable to download or upload torrents. I have a hunch that Comcast implemented a new manner of filtering for customers in my area with the intent of stamping out P2P traffic, however I am not certain if this is the case yet, so I am holding off on a tirade about the friendly neighborhood corporatist internet monopoly for now. I'm interested to know if any other P2P users have encountered similar issues - if so, I hope this post can help.      The torrent client used for file sharing on these connections was qbittorrent, and listened for incoming connections using a random TCP port assignment that changed each time the client was restarted. Outbound connections used something in the high range on the local side (e.g. TCP port 59999) while on the remote side the port would also be random. It was possible to establish a connection to...

Those following Cryptome on Twitter saw some messages that were a little nerve-wracking yesterday. The flood of torrents attributed to Cryptome are not ours. Could be ruses, smears to spread malware. Maybe by HT types. — Cryptome (@Cryptomeorg) July 22, 2015 Some of many [CRYPTOME] torrents gushing wildly recently, could contain [Hacking Team] malware to smear Cryptome https://t.co/3bZ22OQBou — Cryptome (@Cryptomeorg) July 22, 2015 A similar warning was posted to the front page of Cryptome's website: The link in Cryptome's message led me to a Kickass Torrents user account that had been opened ~3 weeks previously under the name Cryptome. The account uses the Cryptome website logo. Similar accounts were created on Monova and Lime Torrents. Putting together an archive for a website you aren't affiliated with, whose content is already free and widely available and has been for many years, isn't necessarily unheard of (?). But doing so while ostensibly...