Film Industry Hires Cyber Hitmen To Take Out Piracy
The film industry is using pirate tactics to beat the pirates – by employing “cyber hitmen” to launch attacks that take out websites hosting illegal movies.
Girish Kumar, managing director of Aiplex Software, a firm in India, told this website that his company, which works for the film industry, was being hired - effectively as hitmen - to launch cyber attacks on sites hosting pirated movies that don’t respond to copyright infringement notices sent to them by the film industry.
Kumar said 95 per cent of sites hosting illegal movies co-operated with notices, but a few - mostly sites hosting torrents and used primarily for illegal content - did not.
“Most movies are released on Friday morning at 10am in India,” Kumar said in a telephone interview. “The movie is released in the morning [and] by afternoon it’s on the internet.”
His company trawled the net to find movies uploaded, he said.
“What we do is we see all those links on the net,” he said.
“We find the hosting [computer] server and send them a copyright infringement notice because they’re not meant to have those links. If they don’t remove [the link] we send them a second notice and ask them [again] to remove it.”
In Australia, distrubuted-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are an offence under section 477.3 of the Criminal Code Act 1995, according to the Australian Federal Police. As for DoS attacks, which are different, according to Australian law a person is guilty of an offence if the person causes “any unauthorised impairment of electronic communication to or from a computer”.