Chinese officials have announced this week the bust of a large hacking ring that was allegedly the nation’s largest distributor of hacking tools.
The Black Hawk Safety Net, which used the site 3800cc.com as a front, allegedly made $1 million in income in 2009 from 12,000 subscribers.
Three admins were arrested as part of the raid. Strangely, the arrests are said to have taken place three months ago, but only reported this week.
Black Hawk was known more as a hacking “training” group, mainly through the sale of malicious software and instructions on how to use them. In 2007, the group made the news for helping create a virus that took down corporate and government systems in Hubei.
Along with the arrest of 29-year-old Li Qiang and 28-year-old Zhang Lei (the third man was not identified), 1.7 million yuan ($250,000 USD) in assets were seized, mainly in cash and computer equipment.
Result for: admins
The IFPI has emphatically noted today that revenue from legal music sales in Sweden has jumped 18 percent since February, thanks to the strong effort in the nation to crackdown on piracy and the shut down of the admins of the infamous torrent tracker The Pirate Bay.
Physical media sales jumped 9 percent in the reported period and digital sales increased 80 percent.
IFPI chairman and chief executive John Kennedy added (via The Guardian): “The increase in sales in Sweden, set against the backdrop of innovative new digital services and tighter copyright laws, is encouraging.It is too early to say if Sweden has permanently turned a corner, but we hope that users there will permanently switch from unlicensed filesharing networks that give nothing back to the music community to great value legal services whose operators recognize continuous investment is needed to discover and promote the talent of tomorrow.“
Result for: admins
Yesterday, the large public torrent tracker The Pirate Bay was taken down by Swedish police, and many users believed it was the end of the site, for good.
Today however, TPB admins have re-opened the site using a new ISP, with the tracker itself expected to be back up soon as well.
In re-opening the site, the Pirate Bay team has also posted a statement that uses one of Winston Churchill’s famous World War II speeches. It may be over the top, but their message is pretty clear.
The speech:
“We have, ourselves, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our Internets, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.
Even though large parts of Internets and many old and famous trackers have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Ifpi and all the odious apparatus of MPAA rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the ef-nets and darknets, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Internets, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the baywords.org, we shall fight on the /. and on the digg, we shall fight in the courts; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, the Internets or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the Anon Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in Cerf’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
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