Honeytrap reveals mass monitoring of downloaders (Paul Marks)

[Dewayne Hendricks]

Paul Marks, *New Scientist*, 4 Sep 2012, via Dave Farber's IP
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/09/honeytrap-catches-copyright-co.html

Anyone who has downloaded pirated music, video or ebooks using a BitTorrent
client has probably had their IP address logged by copyright-enforcement
authorities within 3 hours of doing so. So say computer scientists who
placed a fake pirate server online - and very quickly found monitoring
systems checking out who was taking what from the servers.

The news comes from this week's SecureComm conference in Padua, Italy, where
computer security researcher Tom Chothia and his colleagues at the
University of Birmingham, UK, revealed they have discovered "massive
monitoring" of BitTorrent download sites, such as the PirateBay, has been
taking place for at least three years.

BitTorrent is a data distribution protocol that splits an uploaded digital
media file into many parts and shares it around a swarm of co-operating
servers. Birmingham's fake server acted like a part of a file-sharing swarm
and the connections made to it quickly revealed the presence of file-sharing
monitors run by "copyright enforcement organisations, security companies and
even government research labs". ...

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