Microsoft invests in Russian company that attacks BitTorrent swarms

A Russian startup called "Pirate Pay" has received seed funding from Microsoft. The company's technology is designed to attack BitTorrent swarms and trick clients into disconnecting. They've already been hired by Disney and Sony Pictures to attack downloaders, apparently successfully. The company won't disclose how their technology works, which is usually a sign that it will be trivial to counter -- real security measures still work if the other side knows their mechanics. From TorrentFreak:

The idea started three years ago when the developers were building a traffic management solution for Internet providers. The technology worked well. It was able to stop BitTorrent traffic if needed, which made the developers realize that they might have built the holy anti-piracy grail.

“After creating the prototype, we realized we could more generally prevent files from being downloaded, which meant that the program had great promise in combating the spread of pirated content,” Pirate Pay CEO Andrei Klimenko says.

With this new business model in mind the company continued to develop their product, and it didn’t take long before an investor was willing to support it. Last year Pirate Pay received a $100,000 investment from the Microsoft Seed Financing Fund.

Microsoft Funded Startup Aims to Kill BitTorrent Traffic

• [Dan Hibiki]

  the point isn’t to stop Torrents, it’s to get the likes of Sony, Disney and Microsoft to pay you a huge ton of cash then disappear in to an ether when they demand a progress report.

  • [Patrick McGorrill]

    Russian nerds are tricking copyright holders into giving them lots of money?
    My inner pirate approves of this.

• [SoItBegins]

  Next generation of P2P includes encryption. I’ll bet my shirt on it.

  • [Dan Uznanski]

    This generation of p2p includes encryption.  The difficulty is that getting into the swarm still identifies the actors.

  • [digi_owl]

    Unless next gen P2P holds something like TOR in its design then it will still reveal the IP addresses of at least the nearest NAT enabled router of the people in the swarm. And anything like TOR have a transfer speed impact equal to the weakest hop in the node chain.

• [Kevin Pierce]

  A Steorn by any other name would smell as fishy

• [adoomer]

  In many legal systems interfering with computer system or IT network is recognised as a crime – does it mean that Microsoft finances international crime?

  • [Happler]

     I was going to ask, how is this different than a “Man in the Middle” attack?

  • [Tribune]

    When Microsoft or Disney do it is good, when other people do it it is bad. Sort of like water  boarding. Nothing worse than Bill Gates in a Mickey Mouse costume pouring water over you while you are wrapped in plastic and then being told it is not torture.

    • [Happler]

       You know, I bet that is someone fetish right there..

• [angusm]

  I will laugh and laugh the day that one department at BigMediaCo doesn’t tell the other department what it’s doing, and Department A starts arranging subpoenas for the identities of the users associated with the IP addresses being used to run disruptor bots by Department B.

  “Look at all those goddamn pirates connecting to that torrent – get Legal on the phone, those little bastards are going down!”

  • [GagHalfrunt]

     I read (here on BoingBoing, I think) about how one part of Viacom issued DMCA takedown notices against YouTube accounts operated by another part of Viacom.  The marketing department had been running a viral marketing campaign where they uploaded clips from TV shows to  accounts that appeared to belong to regular users, but they forgot to pass the details of those accounts to the legal department.

• [teapot]

  This makes me glad I haven’t paid for a Microsoft product in years. It also further reinforces my decision to never pay for anything digital.

  Fuck you rights holders. Fuck. You. We are smarter than you and we will always find a way.

  • [Deekshith Allamaneni]

     It is better to use free resources like Linux and Libre Office instead of pirating copyrighted stuff.

    • [teapot]

      I agree with you about open source stuff. I prefer Open Office to MS, but I never use either… InDesign is where it’s at for document layout.

      Unfortunately I am still not convinced that Linux can do everything I need a computer to do because I use some odd peripherals and purpose-specific software… so I help myself to windoze.

• [fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

  I have to wonder what the legal departments of the large American corporations getting involved in this are thinking…

  Sure, the Russians are about as likely to face justice as the Russian Business Network of widespread notoriety; but that doesn’t make hiring Russian heavies to DoS people you don’t like any more legal in the US…

• [Tadas Jelinek]

  In most countries messing with networks that do not belong to you, DDOS, MITM attacks, etc are crime…
  But in the end it will only improve the protocols & tools that are used for sharing. Soo… Good job Microsoft.

• [stephenl123]

  Inherently, they’re doing this internationally.  The Russian hackers are pretty safe.  But Sony, Disney and Microsoft have publicly acknowledged paying them.  Also, Sony, Disney and Microsoft have financial interests in many, many countries.  So just one of those jurisdictions needs to be willing to prosecute the crime.

• [bjacques]

  *cough* Foreign Corrupt Practices Act *cough*

• [traalfaz]

  Back to Usenet, boys.