Police Tracked Traffic of All National ISPs To Catch Pirate IPTV Users (torrentfreak.com) 68
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: In May 2022, Italian police claimed that thousands of people had unwittingly subscribed to a pirate IPTV service being monitored by the authorities. When users tried to access illegal streams, a warning message claimed that they had already been tracked. With fines now being received through the mail, police are making some extraordinary claims about how this was made possible. [...] Today's general consensus is that hitting site operators is much more effective but whenever the opportunity appears, undermining user confidence should be part of the strategy. Italian police have been following the same model by shutting down pirate IPTV services (1,2,3) and warning users they're up next.
Letters recently sent to homes in Italy reveal that police were not bluffing. A copy letter obtained by Iilsole24ore identifies the send as the Nucleo Speciale Tutela Privacy e Frodi Tecnologiche, a Guardia di Finanza unit specializing in IT-related crime. It refers to an anti-IPTV police operation in May. The operation targeted around 500 pirate IPTV resources including websites and Telegram channels. At the time, police also reported that 310+ pieces of IPTV infrastructure, including primary and balancing servers distributing illegal streams, were taken offline. Police also claimed that a tracking system made it possible to identify the users of the pirate streams. The letter suggests extraordinary and potentially unprecedented tactics.
The letters state that Italian authorities were able to track the IPTV users by "arranging for the redirection of all Internet service providers' national connections" so that subscribers placed their orders on a police-controlled server configured to record their activity. In comments to Iilsole24ore, Gian Luca Berruti, head of investigations at the Guardia di Finanza, describes the operation as "decisive" in the fight against cybercrime. Currently deployed to Italy's National Cybersecurity Agency, Berruti references "innovative investigative techniques" supported by "new technological tools." Technical details are not being made public, but it's claimed that IPTV users were tracked by "tracing of all connections to pirate sites (IPs) combined, in real-time," and "cross-referencing telematic information with that derived from the payment mechanisms used." The police operation in May was codenamed Operazione:Dottor Pezzotto. A Telegram channel with exactly the same branding suffered a traffic collapse at exactly the same time. "The letters refer to an administrative copyright infringement fine of just 154 euros or 'in case of recidivism' a total of 1,032 euros," notes the report. "However, if people pay their fines within 60 days, the amounts are reduced to 51 euros and 344 euros respectively."
"Around 1,600 people are believed to have been targeted in this first wave of letters but according to Andrea Duillo, CEO of Sky Italia, this is just the start."
Letters recently sent to homes in Italy reveal that police were not bluffing. A copy letter obtained by Iilsole24ore identifies the send as the Nucleo Speciale Tutela Privacy e Frodi Tecnologiche, a Guardia di Finanza unit specializing in IT-related crime. It refers to an anti-IPTV police operation in May. The operation targeted around 500 pirate IPTV resources including websites and Telegram channels. At the time, police also reported that 310+ pieces of IPTV infrastructure, including primary and balancing servers distributing illegal streams, were taken offline. Police also claimed that a tracking system made it possible to identify the users of the pirate streams. The letter suggests extraordinary and potentially unprecedented tactics.
The letters state that Italian authorities were able to track the IPTV users by "arranging for the redirection of all Internet service providers' national connections" so that subscribers placed their orders on a police-controlled server configured to record their activity. In comments to Iilsole24ore, Gian Luca Berruti, head of investigations at the Guardia di Finanza, describes the operation as "decisive" in the fight against cybercrime. Currently deployed to Italy's National Cybersecurity Agency, Berruti references "innovative investigative techniques" supported by "new technological tools." Technical details are not being made public, but it's claimed that IPTV users were tracked by "tracing of all connections to pirate sites (IPs) combined, in real-time," and "cross-referencing telematic information with that derived from the payment mechanisms used." The police operation in May was codenamed Operazione:Dottor Pezzotto. A Telegram channel with exactly the same branding suffered a traffic collapse at exactly the same time. "The letters refer to an administrative copyright infringement fine of just 154 euros or 'in case of recidivism' a total of 1,032 euros," notes the report. "However, if people pay their fines within 60 days, the amounts are reduced to 51 euros and 344 euros respectively."
"Around 1,600 people are believed to have been targeted in this first wave of letters but according to Andrea Duillo, CEO of Sky Italia, this is just the start."
MASSIVE waste of money (Score:2, Troll)
If the market is a thing, let the market sort itself out. Shouldn't need to have cops involved.
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And this is going to probably sound bad, but I'm learning that bundling may not be a bad thing. You've got to subscribe to all of these different streaming services to get access to the shows you want to watch. Each with its own cost and its own interface.
What's even worse is when you do find that show you want to watch on a service you subscribe to and when you go to watch it, you get a message saying, "Sorry, your subscription does not include this content."
Argh! So frustrating!
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With a lot more headaches. I only have to remember one cable TV account. Not 50 different streaming services.
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You've got to subscribe to all of these different streaming services to get access to the shows you want to watch. Each with its own cost and its own interface.
Exactly. But you know how I handle this? I simply don't subscribe to those services and don't watch those shows -- even if I'd like to watch them. (I know that's simplistic and probably unhelpful, but just noting that we don't have to watch movies and/or TV shows, especially if it's segregated to its own service just to boost someone's profit margin ...)
Re: MASSIVE waste of money (Score:2)
I know that you are correct. Most of the shows I watch are old and could easily be pulled down from Usenet; as I get older I just donâ(TM)t want to do that anymore and do enjoy watching a spattering of classic shows. Too bad each one is owned by a different network!
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Great news! (Score:5, Funny)
This must mean all the murders and rapes in Italy have been solved?
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This must mean all the murders and rapes in Italy have been solved?
And... solved that 2020 US election Italygate [wikipedia.org] thing. :-)
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This must mean all the murders and rapes in Italy have been solved?
It baffles me that people continue to trot this nonsensical logic out.
Where in life does anything work that way? I mean, seriously, do you expect world leaders to completely ignore their local economies until they deal with all foreign affairs, or do you expect them to juggle priorities and deal with each in turn? Do you expect Apple to suspend Mac sales until they sell enough iPhones in the quarter to be profitable, or do you understand that Apple is big enough to serve both product categories? Do you stop
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Most violent crime goes unsolved. out of 1000 sexual assaults, 995 perpetrators will walk free. Until that number is 0, not one single police officer should spend one second of time on any non-violent crime.
Sure, because absolutism and false dichotomies are sound rationales for decision making. /s
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Should victimless crimes exist? Say someone goes 50mph in a 40 zone and no one is hurt.
Is the person who created the content harmed when some nerd copies it off someone elses hard drive? A potential loss of a sale, is that harmed? I could see where someone spent a lot of effort creating content, then has it taken without compensation, might have a case. At the same time, the parent poster raised an excellent point that there are far greater crimes being committed. There's a finite number of law enforcement,
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Why waste effort on people they can't catch to begin with?
Re:Great news! (Score:4, Insightful)
LEO's should not be involved *at all* in what has no business being anything more than a civil tort... and a very minor one at that, seeing as unauthorized copying deprives no one of anything.
Re:Great news! (Score:5, Insightful)
This must mean all the murders and rapes in Italy have been solved?
Nope, but that the MAFIAA is using its influence to bog down police with less important stuff.
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funny you mention this precisely in this case because, you know ... italy :D
it baffles me how you can spend days in south italy and not see a single cop. at most a few military outposts guarding tourist attractions, mainly for fear of terrorism. but anything else? traffic, petty crime ... the mafia deals with that, no police needed. and it works pretty well, apparently.
then again this is all bullshit. seems there is massive unauthorized use of streaming service there, so they set up a honeypot and bugged 16
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This must mean all the murders and rapes in Italy have been solved?
Or at least "buried" so nobody sees them anymore.
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"Guardia di Finanza" is more or less the police branch of our version of the IRS (they are a military entity and have guns, by the way) and they don't deal directly with murders and rapes. So the proper question would be "have all the high-profile white-collar fraud, embezzlement, corruption and tax-evasion cases in Italy been solved?"
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I realize you are joking, but FYI, the Guardia Di Finanza investigate financial crimes (such as tax evasion), not murders.
At least we see who police really works for (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:At least we see who police really works for (Score:4, Insightful)
At least we see who police really works for.
Yes, we do. The reach of FIFA is long. It's a World Cup year. All these unlicensed IPTV crackdowns in Europe this year are not a coincidence.
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People who urinate in public are often just disgusting drunk assholes who can't be bothered to walk to the nearest bathroom. I called one out two nights ago having a piss outside my local pub. He was literally about 20 meters from the nearest rest room in the pub, that was still open. People like that need to be fined heavily. As for the fining of people watching unlicensed broadcasts - if the ISP's are taking on the responsibility of tracking who's watching them so they can be fined, then the ISP is respon
So VPNs are a good idea after all (Score:3, Insightful)
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After some have tried to make the case that in this day and age we don't need VPNs (because: end-to-end encryption) it seems that we have a good reason: to avoid ongoing surveillance by local state actors acting on behalf of corporations.
Maybe not:
The letters state that Italian authorities were able to track the IPTV users by "arranging for the redirection of all Internet service providers' national connections" so that subscribers placed their orders on a police-controlled server configured to record their activity.
The summary is confusing AF. I suspect translations from Italian to English, and from Tech to Italian to English are not helping matters. But it sounds like what they actually did was hijack a sign-up server or payment processor DNS to point to a server they controlled. If so then a VPN would be useless if the user used a traceable payment method or email address.
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Why are people paying to pirate stuff? If they're stupid enough to shell out money for copyrighted things how can they know they're not downloading it from a legit source? Couldn't it be the copyright holder or a licensed party distributing it? How can a user even know?
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But it sounds like what they actually did was hijack a sign-up server or payment processor DNS to point to a server they controlled. If so then a VPN would be useless ...
I hear that FTX recently found a way to transactionally make payment money simply "vanish".
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Re:So VPNs are a good idea after (Score:2)
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Cut in local taxes? (Score:3)
After some have tried to make the case that in this day and age we don't need VPNs (because: end-to-end encryption) it seems that we have a good reason: to avoid ongoing surveillance by local state actors acting on behalf of corporations.
Indeed - since local police are now working for corporations, perhaps they (corporation) should foot the bill and cities lower residents' taxes.
Re:So VPNs are a good idea after all (Score:4, Insightful)
After some have tried to make the case that in this day and age we don't need VPNs (because: end-to-end encryption) it seems that we have a good reason: to avoid ongoing surveillance by local state actors acting on behalf of corporations.
VPNs are great, I use one for all my torrenting, but it sounds like this was more of a honeypot operation. Even if you use a VPN, signing up with your payment info kind of gives you away.
This is actually one of the few good uses for cryptocurrency, though pre-paid credit cards should work as well and are probably easier for most people.
So you spy on a COUNTRY to enforce TV copyright ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let alone justified ?
Spying on a whole country to enforce payments ?
Make sure you vote for parties opposed to this in your country
And it's all the more reason to pirate, until copyright terms are down from Mickey Mouse's 95 years to a reasonable 5 years.
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Find pirate server
Take over pirate server, either by actually taking control of that box, or by manipulating the DNS records to point to a controlled box, or by manipulating the routing tables to point the IP address to a controlled box
Identify users by IP address/payment info/contact info
Profit
Not actually "spying on the whole country", but it does seem like a close enough match to the described activity to be plausible.
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Ah, cool, so it was option 3. Thanks for confirming :)
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Spying on a whole country to enforce payments ?
There is no indication that's what happened.
The verbiage is odd, but it does make it clear that what happened is one of 2 things:
1) DNS was taken over (either at the ISP level, or via registrar- unclear)
2) ISPs voluntarily sent traffic bound for the pirate sites to the authorities.
Spying on illegal behavior is literally one of the jobs of law enforcement. There's no indication they were spying on people not going to the pirate sites.
This is legal in every single country in the west.
It's a pretty st
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Remember: Like it or not, piracy is illegal.
Piracy should be a civil matter, not a criminal one. Our police have a hard enough time dealing with actual public safety without diverting valuable resources to acting as glorified security guards for entertainment corporations.
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But it isn't.
What I think I'm seeing here, is people who generally agree with you that piracy should be a civil matter (great!) but then making disingenuous arguments against police doing bog-standard crime-fighting because regardless of how we fell, it is a crime, as passed by our duly elected legislatures.
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regardless of how we feel, it is a crime, as passed by our duly elected legislatures.
Regardless of how we feel, it is a crime, as bought from our duly elected legislators.
FTFY. At least it should be no surprise why law enforcement is so widely disrespected.
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So they choose which ones to put effort in to solve.
Murder, rape, burglary, robbery, fraud : IF 95% of those crimes are solved and the crimerate is tiny,
THEN the police can CONSIDER spending a couple of man-months helping out megacorps with their problem with people watching their programs.
If not, the police should spend OUR money on solving REAL crime.
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The police cannot solve all crimes, therefor the only things that are effectively illegal are murder?
You are presenting a scenario where you assume that the police only have a single pool of officers that pull randomly from the crime hat.
That isn't how it works.
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I would have thought it was obvious to anyone, but let's go through it for you:
The police have a budget.
They choose who to hire.
They can hire detectives to solve crimes to aid the victims of crime and prevent crime.
Or they can hire failed network engineers to chase down people WATCHING TV to get even more money for media megacorporations.
And in Italy it is apparently the latter.
Got it ?
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I would have thought it was obvious to anyone, but let's go through it for you:
This snarkiness is going to bit you in the ass. Your argument is indefensible because it's based on flatly incorrect premises.
The police have a budget.
The budget is not zero sum. It is negotiated based on need and ability to grant it.
They choose who to hire.
Oh, that's good. I had thought maybe for a second the corpos were choosing for them in your fictional world.
They can hire detectives to solve crimes to aid the victims of crime and prevent crime.
Indeed, they can!
Here's where the plot twist comes in.
Copyright infringement (not all, of course) is criminal. They are criminal precisely because they have victims.
We can argue all day about
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The fact that you could formulate such an argument based on obviously demonstrable falsehoods is mind-blowing.
You're the kind of dumb motherfucker that lives his life thinking aphorisms are factual.
I thank you for the laugh.
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You're not coming out ahead.
You're just looking like a dumbshit wasting your shitty life away.
Got it?
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I'm merely making an argument against going nuts and thinking that someone using legitimate legal tactics against something you don't think should be illegal is somehow behaving illegally.
That's fucking nonsense.
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as someone else explains below, you don't need that to set up a honeypot, this is all probably bullshit to get attention and praise.
besides 1: all modern states do that anyway, for far more obscure reasons.
besides 2: you have not been paying attention to italian elections lately.
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re. 2: I doubt the new fascist government had time to set this up so soon since taking office.
Re: So you spy on a COUNTRY to enforce TV copyrigh (Score:3)
Correction (Score:2)
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yeah, who would trust the talians, let alone the talian police!
(innocent tongue in cheek pun on a typo, please don't get mad. or ... please do! ;D)
Buy three Amazon gift cards (Score:2)
Then tell our phone operator the codes. This is not a scam. We caught you watching TV. We're the real police and if you don't pay this small fine, we'll lock up your grandma and kill a kitten. Pinky promise.
piracy is beautiful. like a brick in Murdoch's fac (Score:2)
Rupert Murdoch owns a large swathe of the Italian TV landscape, unless something has changed [hollywoodreporter.com].
I love seeing police put in some honest hard work to protect a failed content delivery model.
Like the homeless guy getting bashed on the corner outside a factory, simultaneously being raided for counterfeit clothing.
who knew (Score:2)
Most users think that if they subscribe, the service is legit. They should only have gotten a warning, not a fine.
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It actually makes me wonder. The article says "When users tried to access illegal streams, a warning message claimed that they had already been tracked." This implies that that the users received the message instead of the stream. It seems that technically they haven't watched the pirated content, so what law has actually been broken?