File-sharing services such as BitTorrent are now monitored so aggressively, suspected illegal activity is tracked within hours, researchers at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom revealed this week.
An illegal file sharer using BitTorrent to download popular content “will be connected to and have their IP address logged within three hours of starting a download,” the report states.
BitTorrent users swap an array of legal content, but the site is also used extensively for illegal exchanges of copyrighted material such as music, movies and software.
The researchers developed software that behaved like a BitTorrent client and recorded all connections made to that software. About 40 percent of connections were made within three hours of the university software logging in. The slowest monitor took 33 hours.
“This work reveals the full scale of the monitoring of illegal file sharers,” said Dr. Tom Chothia, researcher at the University of Birmingham’s School of Computer Science. “Almost everyone that shares popular films and music illegally will be connected to by a monitor and will have their IP address logged.”
Chothia said most major monitors conceal their identity by using hosting companies to perform the searches for them, while other monitors are identifiable as “copyright enforcement organizations, security companies and even government research labs.” Use of third-party hosting companies also allows monitors to evade ‘block lists’ that try to prevent known monitors from connecting to file sharers.
With prosecutions of file sharers on the rise, Dr. Chothia said the standard of evidence used in such cases is a concern.
“All the monitors observed during the study would connect to file sharers believed to be sharing illegal content and verify that they were running the BitTorrent software, however they would not actually collect any of the files being shared,” he said.
“Therefore, it is questionable whether the monitors observed would actually have evidence of file sharing that would stand up in court.”
Researchers presented their findings earlier this week at the SecureComm Conference in Padua.
The report can be downloaded at: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~tpc/Papers/P2PMonitor.pdf.
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File-Sharing Sites Aggressively Monitored, Report Reveals
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