British and Dutch police have shut down a “widely-used” source of illegally-downloaded music.
A flat on Teesside and several properties in Amsterdam were raided as part of an Interpol investigation into the members-only website OiNK.
The UK-run site has leaked 60 major pre-release albums this year alone, said the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
A 24-year-old man from Middlesbrough was arrested on Tuesday morning.
‘Extremely lucrative’
The IT worker was led from his home in the town’s Grange Road and is being questioned on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and infringement of copyright law.
At the same time his employer – a large multi-national company – and his father’s home were also raided.
A Cleveland Police spokesman said: “This extremely lucrative and creative scheme consisted of a private file-sharing website being set up. Membership was by invitation only.
“The site allowed the uploading and downloading of pre-release music and media to thousands of members.”
An IFPI spokesman said: “Once an album had been posted on the OiNK website, the users that download that music then passed the content to other websites, forums and blogs, where multiple copies were made.
“Within a few hours of a popular pre-release track being posted on the OiNK site, hundreds of copies can be found further down the illegal online supply chain.”
The site’s servers, based in Amsterdam, were seized in a series of raids last week.
It followed a two-year investigation by music industry bodies the IFPI and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI).
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Miscreants have unleashed a new strain of a sophisticated Trojan that targets eBay users by feeding them spoofed web pages containing fraudulent information about high-ticket purchases, The Register has learned. It has already contributed to an $8,600 loss by one eBay member.
The Trojan installs a scaled-down webserver on an infected machine that masquerades as eBay and several third-party destinations frequently used to sniff out fraudulent offerings, including Carfax.com, Autocheck.com and Escrow.com.
When a victim browses to one of these sites, the webserver creates a parallel universe of sorts, in which the victim sees counterfeit pages designed to counter fraud protection mechanisms offered by eBay and third-party sites.
“To think that somehow they got software on their system that managed to spoof all the validation sites – that’s a shit-scary story,” said Roger Thompson, a researcher at Exploit Prevention Labs who specializes in web-based attacks. “It’s fiendishly clever.”
The malware was found on the machine of one eBay Motors user who recently lost $8,650 after trying to buy a 2005 Jeep Liberty advertised for 10 days on the site. Customer representatives have refused to cover the theft because, they said, the transaction was made outside of eBay.
Shortly after making the offer, the victim received a notification in the My Messages section of her eBay account telling her she had won the auction. eBay has long cautioned users not to rely on notifications unless they appear in this official section.
The malware installed on the victim’s machine caused her browser to display a counterfeit version of just such a message. Had she used a non-infected computer to access her account, no such message would have appeared.
“There’s no reason to suspect it’s fraud until its too late,” said the Ohio-based user, who agreed to tell her story on the condition her identity was not revealed. The Register was able to verify the scam by confirming details with eBay and by reviewing screenshots, emails and files pulled from her machine.
The malware appears to be a reworking of Trojan.Bayrob, which first came to light in early March when researchers from Symantec wrote reports about it.
It arrives in an attachment to an email responding to a bid and installs a local proxy server that redirects traffic bound for eBay. The proxy, according to Symantec, spoofs sensitive pages on eBay, including online auction’s “ask a question” messaging feature. The Trojan also inflates the user feedback score of the purported buyer, according to Symantec.
In the intervening seven months, the Trojan has been updated so that, among other things, traffic bound for sites such as Carfax and nine other addresses maintained by third-party companies will also be redirected. This helps thwart victims who try to independently confirm details fed on the falsified eBay pages.
eBay spokeswoman Nichola Sharpe says the company’s security team has forwarded samples of the new strain to anti-virus companies so they can add it to the updates they send to customers.
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Flash memory maker SanDisk Corp. on Monday will debut an online video service and a USB flash drive that can carry television programs and videos from a computer for playback on TVs.
The Sansa TakeTV video player — an ensemble of an oversized USB drive, remote control and a small dock that connects to a TV — and its accompanying video service, Fanfare, marks the latest attempt by a company looking to bridge content between the PC and the television.
Similar to using a USB drive to store and move data files, users of TakeTV can drag-and-drop video files stored on their computer — Fanfare downloads, home videos or other unrestricted video content from the Web — onto the device. Users can then plug it into the cradle connected to a TV. A simple menu appears on the TV to scroll through the files for playback.
The TakeTV player is $99.99 for a 4 gigabyte model and $149.99 for an 8 GB one that can hold up to 10 hours of video. Fanfare, in a test stage, offers premium TV shows for $1.99 per download — roughly the same price as rival services, but SanDisk says it hopes to ultimately provide a broad mixture of free and ad-supported content as well as pay-per-download videos.
Fanfare’s catalog at launch is small, with about 85 titles. It features TV shows from CBS, including “CSI” and “Survivor,” Showtime, TV Guide, and Smithsonian Networks. Dozens of titles are being added each week, SanDisk said.
The online video service is a new venture for Milpitas-based SanDisk, which is the leading maker of flash memory cards and holds a distant but steady second-place position behind Apple Inc. in the portable media player market with a 10 percent share in the U.S., according to market researcher IDC.
SanDisk saw an opportunity in the fledgling market it didn’t want to pass up, said Kate Purmal, senior vice president and general manager of SanDisk’s digital content unit.
The distribution of videos, movies and television shows over the Internet is expected to grow as companies ranging from Apple and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to the TV networks themselves compete for the audience. The various methods of getting the video from over the Internet onto the TV, however, has yet to become easy or cheap enough for the mainstream market.
CBS Corp., one of SanDisk’s first major partners, found in its consumer research of the TakeTV product that people liked its simplicity, compact size, and price, said David Poltrack, president of CBS Vision.
SanDisk will need to build a larger video catalog to succeed, said Danielle Levitas, analyst at IDC.
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