This is a weird one.
The FBI isn’t known for a harmonious history with the porn industry, but this time law enforcement is trying to do 25 adult website owners a favor and let them know they’ve been hacked and had all their content stolen and uploaded to torrenting sites. The only problem is, the FBI can’t get in touch with those owners.
According to the Free Speech Coalition (FSC), the alleged perp has now been arrested, having target mainstream and porn sites to upload to P2P sites. His method was simple: open an account with multiple identities, break through security and steal other credentials, which he then used to take and upload the content.
Unfortunately, and as I’ve documented elsewhere before, porn site owners are a shadowy sort generally. That’s caused a problem for the FBI, which is hoping that the FSC will help it get in touch with the site’s owners.
Specifically, it wants to let them know that, well, they’ve been hacked, how they were hacked, and how to fix it. It also wants estimates of losses for the trial.
By working with the FSC, for what will be a trifling $100 – $200 rate for a porn site owner, they’ll be able to contact the FBI without disclosing their identities.
Given that porn is a notoriously used avenue for hackers to distribute malware (whether that’s malicious code in a website, infected P2P downloads etc.), it’s perhaps more worrying to hear that the FBI apparently thinks that security on adult sites is far behind where it should be.
“The agents I met with observed that the level of security implemented on adult sites is significantly behind the standards of the rest of the entertainment industry,” the FSC’s Chairman of Board of Directors, Jeffrey Douglas says. “They are enthusiastic about doing a presentation with case studies of previous website security breaches to educate the interested industry players. It could be done either as a webinar or real in person seminar or both.”
Well, would you look at that folks, the FBI and porn industry planning a party.
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