Just over a month ago, a Javascript cryptocurrency miner was silently added to The Pirate Bay. Noticed by users who observed their CPU usage going through the roof, it later transpired the site was trialing a miner operated by Coinhive.

Many users were disappointed that The Pirate Bay had added the Javascript-based Monero coin miner without their permission. However, it didn’t take long for people to see the potential benefits, with a raft of other sites adding the miner in the hope of generating additional revenue.

Now, however, Coinhive has an unexpected and potentially serious problem to deal with. The company has just revealed that on Monday night its DNS records maintained at Cloudflare were accessed by a third-party, allowing an unnamed attacker to redirect user mining traffic to a server they controlled.

“The DNS records for coinhive.com have been manipulated to redirect requests for the coinhive.min.js to a third party server. This third party server hosted a modified version of the JavaScript file with a hardcoded site key. This essentially let the attacker ‘steal’ hashes from our users,” Coinhive said in a statement.

The company hasn’t revealed how long the unauthorized redirect stayed in place for, but it appears that all coins mined on sites hosting Coinhive’s script were ‘stolen’ during the period, instead of being credited to their accounts.

Coinhive stresses that no user account information was leaked and that its website and database servers were uncompromised. But while that’s good news, the method that the hackers used to access the company’s DNS provider lay in a basic security error.

Back in 2014, crowdfunding platform Kickstarter – which Coinhive used – fell victim to a security breach. After being advised of the fact by law enforcement officials, Kickstarter shut down unauthorized access, began strengthening its systems, while advising customers to do the same.

While Coinhive did respond to the warning to ensure that its data was safe, something slipped through the net. One piece of information – its Cloudflare account password – remained unchanged after the Kickstarter attack. It now seems the most likely culprit for this week’s DNS breach.

“The root cause for this incident was an insecure password for our Cloudflare account that was probably leaked with the Kickstarter data breach back in 2014,” Coinhive says.

“We have learned hard lessons about security and used 2FA and unique passwords with all services since, but we neglected to update our years old Cloudflare account.”

While not mentioning Coinhive explicitly, Kickstarter warned earlier this month that the 2014 incident may not be completely over. In an update posted on the site Oct 6, Kickstarter noted that some of its customers had recently been hearing more information about the breach from notification service Have I been pwned?.

In the meantime, Coinhive has issued an apology and indicated it will find ways to reimburse sites which have lost revenue as a result of the DNS hack.

“We’re deeply sorry about this severe oversight,” the company said. “Our current plan is to credit all sites with an additional 12 hours of their the daily average hashrate. Please give us a few hours to roll this out.”

Based on earlier calculations carried out by TF, The Pirate Bay (if it was mining during the breach) could be potentially owed around $200 for the lost hashes, give or take. After turning off mining in September, the site reactivated it again in October, with no opt-out. The situation appears fluid.

While the hack is obviously a disappointment, Coinhive appears to have advised its users quickly and transparently, which under the circumstances is exactly what’s required. The fact that it’s offering compensation to users will also be welcomed.

The breach is the latest controversy to hit the company. Earlier this month, Cloudflare began banning sites which implemented Coinhive mining without informing their users. The CDN company said it considered non-advised mining as malware.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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Over the past several years, Rozcomnadzor has become a highly controversial government body in Russia. With responsibility for ordering web-blockades against sites the country deems disruptive, it’s effectively Russia’s online censorship engine.

In total, Rozcomnadzor has ordered the blocking of more than 82,000 sites. Within that total, at least 4,000 have been rendered inaccessible on copyright grounds, with an additional 41,000 innocent platforms blocked as collateral damage.

This massive over-blocking has been widely criticized in Russia but until now, Rozcomnadzor has appeared pretty much untouchable. However, a scandal is now engulfing the organization after at least four key officials were charged with fraud offenses.

News that something was potentially amiss began leaking out two weeks ago, when Russian publication Vedomosti reported on a court process in which the initials of the defendants appeared to coincide with officials at Rozcomnadzor.

The publication suspected that three men were involved; Roskomnadzor spokesman Vadim Ampelonsky, head of the legal department Boris Yedidin, and Alexander Veselchakov, who acts as an advisor to the head of the department monitoring radio frequencies.

The prosecution’s case indicated that the defendants were involved in “fraud committed by an organized group either on an especially large scale or entailing the deprivation of citizen’s rights.” Indeed, no further details were made available, with the head of Rozcomnadzor Alexander Zharov claiming he knew nothing about a criminal case and refusing to answer questions.

It later transpired that four employees had been charged with fraud, including Anastasiya Zvyagintseva, who acts as the general director of CRFC, an agency under the control of Rozcomnadzor.

According to Kommersant, Zvyagintseva’s involvement is at the core of the matter. She claims to have been forced to put “ghost employees” on the payroll, whose salaries were then paid to existing employees in order to increase their salaries.

The investigation into the scandal certainly runs deep. It’s reported that FSB officers have been spying on Rozcomnadzor officials for six months, listening to their phone conversations, monitoring their bank accounts, and even watching the ATM machines they used.

Local media reports indicate that the illegal salary scheme ran from 2012 until February 2017 and involved some 20 million rubles ($347,000) of illegal payments. These were allegedly used to retain ‘valuable’ employees when their regular salaries were not lucrative enough to keep them at the site-blocking body.

While Zvyagintseva has been released pending trial, Ampelonsky, Yedidin, and Veselchakov have been placed under house arrest by the Chertanovsky Court of Moscow until November 7.

Rozcomnadzor’s website is currently inaccessible.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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The Czech Pirates have made quite a name for themselves in recent years.

The political party previously took on a local anti-piracy outfit by launching their own movie download sites, making the point that linking is not a crime.

The bold move resulted in a criminal investigation, but the case was eventually dropped after it was deemed that the Pirates acted in accordance with EU law.

In the political arena, the Czech Pirate Party booked several successes as well. In Parliamentary elections, however, the party never managed to beat the required threshold. Until this weekend.

With 10.79% of the total vote, the Pirates won 22 seats in the national parliament. Not just that, they also became the third largest political party in the country, where more than 30 parties participated in the elections.

The Czech Republic becomes the fourth country where a Pirate Party is represented in the national parliament, following Sweden, Germany, and Iceland, which is quite an achievement.

“It is the best result of any Pirate Party in history and gives us a great mandate to transform the dynamics of Czech politics. At the same time, we understand this as a huge responsibility towards the voters and the Pirate movement as a whole,” Tomáš Vymazal, one of the new Members of Parliament, tells TorrentFreak.

The Pirates (photo via)

While there were some celebrations after the election result came in, the Czech Pirate Party is moving full steam ahead. The twenty-two newly elected members have already held their first meeting, discussing how to get the most out of their negotiations with other parties.

“The negotiation team has been established and the club’s chairman was elected. We’ll now need to set up our offices, hire assistants and distribute specific responsibilities among the club,” Vymazal says.

“One of the first issues we will open up a discussion about in the parliament will be the fixing of a historic anti-corruption bill.”

The bill in question makes sure that every contract the state or a state-owned business enters into is put on the record. However, the previous parliament introduced several exceptions and as a result, many of the money flows remain hidden from the public.

Like other Pirate parties, the Czech branch is by no means a single issue outfit. The party has a broad vision which it distilled to a twenty point program. In addition to fighting corruption, this includes tax reform and increasing teachers’ salaries, for example.

More classical pirate themes are also on the agenda of course. The Pirate Party wants to overhaul the country’s copyright legislation, stop internet censorship, and put an end to cell phone tracking. In addition, the use of medical marijuana should be allowed.

With the backing of hundreds of thousands of Czechs, these and other issues will certainly be on the political agenda during the years to come. It’s now up to the Pirates to make them a reality.

“We must do a very good job to successfully establish the Pirate Party in Czech politics and deliver on the promises we made to the voters,” Vymazal says.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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Free music is easy to find nowadays. Just head over to YouTube and you can find millions of tracks including many of the most recent releases.

While some artists happily share their work, the major record labels don’t want tracks to leak outside YouTube’s ecosystem. For this reason, they want YouTube to MP3 rippers shut down.

Earlier this month, the RIAA sent its overview of “notorious markets” to the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), highlighting several of these sites and asking for help.

“The overall popularity of these sites and the staggering volume of traffic it attracts evidences the enormous damage being inflicted on the U.S. record industry,” the RIAA wrote, calling out Mp3juices.cc, Convert2mp3.net, Savefrom.net, Ytmp3.cc, Convertmp3.io, Flvto.biz, and 2conv.com as the most popular offenders.

This position is shared by many other music industry groups. They see stream ripping as the largest piracy threat online. After shutting down YouTube-MP3, they hope to topple other sites as well, ideally with the backing of the US Government.

However, not everyone shares the belief that stream ripping equals copyright infringement.

In a rebuttal, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) informs the USTR that the RIAA is trying to twist the law in its favor. Not all stream ripping sites are facilitating copyright infringement by definition, the EFF argues.

“RIAA’s discussion of ‘stream-ripping’ websites misstates copyright law. Websites that simply allow users to extract the audio track from a user-selected online video are not ‘illegal sites’ and are not liable for copyright infringement, unless they engage in additional conduct that meets the definition of infringement,” the EFF writes.

Flvto

While some people may use these sites to ‘pirate’ tracks there are also legitimate purposes, the digital rights group notes. Some creators specifically allow others to download and modify their work, for example, and in other cases ripping can be seen as fair use.

“There exists a vast and growing volume of online video that is licensed for free downloading and modification, or contains audio tracks that are not subject to copyright,” the EFF stresses.

“Moreover, many audio extractions qualify as non-infringing fair uses under copyright. Providing a service that is capable of extracting audio tracks for these lawful purposes is itself lawful, even if some users infringe.”

The fact that these sites generate revenue from advertising doesn’t make them illegal either. While there are some issues that could make a site liable, such as distributing infringing content to third parties, the EFF argues that many of the sites identified by the RIAA are not clearly involved in such activities.

Instead of solely relying on the characterizations of the RIAA, the US Government should judge these sites independently, in accordance with the law.

“USTR must apply U.S. law as it is, not as particular industry organizations wish it to be. Accordingly, it is inappropriate to describe ‘stream-ripping’ sites as engaging in or facilitating infringement. That logic would discourage U.S. firms from providing many forms of useful, lawful technology that processes or interacts with copyrighted work in digital form, to the detriment of U.S. trade,” the EFF concludes.

It is worth highlighting that most sites the RIAA mentioned specifically advertise themselves as YouTube converters. While this violates YouTube’s Terms of Service, something the streaming platform isn’t happy with, it doesn’t automatically classify them as infringing services.

Ideally, the RIAA and other music industry group would like YouTube to shut down these sites but if that doesn’t happen, more lawsuits may follow in the future. Then, the claims from both sides can be properly tested in court.

The full EFF response is available here (pdf). In addition to the stream ripping comments, the digital rights group also defends CDN providers such as Cloudflare, reverse proxies, and domain registrars from MPAA and RIAA piracy complaints.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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