Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Following The Twitter Hack Trail To DigitalGangster
One thing that didn’t make a lot of sense about the 33 celebrity Twitter accounts hacked this morning - the messages left on the various accounts weren’t consistent and were clearly written by different people with different agendas.
Fox News got “Breaking: Bill O Riley is gay,” and Rick Sanchez from CNN got “I am high on crack right now might not be coming into work today.” But other Twitter accounts had links to sites to generate affiliate revenue. Facebook’s Twitter account had a message pointing to getlaid.info (now shut down), which redirected to a porn site. President Elect Barack Obama’s account had a link to a site that offered a $500 gas card for taking a survey. Both had affiliate links associated with them.
Why were some sites simply defaced while others used to generate affiliate fees? It all seems to point back to one person that goes by “Gmz” on a hacker site called Digital Gangster (this site was also where Miley Cyrus photos were posted after they were taken from her hacked Gmail account). Gmz, says a source, obtained the account credentials for the Twitter accounts and then posted them on DigitalGanster. It was removed shortly afterward, but not before others grabbed the information and started to post on the various sites.
A later post on Digital Gangster asked “Who did it?” Gmz chimed into the thread, saying “That guy must have been a very generous individual. To hand out accounts rather than use that for profit. Could it be enough for respect or just enough for that user to be identified as an “idiot”?”
I’ve emailed Gmz from my new Digital Gangster account to confirm that he originally posted the credentials and I can’t wait to read his unlikely response. Twitter, of course, could follow up with Digital Gangster via their attorneys or the police and get access to that information. And it should be very easy to track the people who posted affiliate links on hacked Twitter accounts - just contact the affiliate companies and follow the money.
I wouldn’t be surprised if arrests were made in connection with all the Twitter drama this morning, once all this plays out.
Mininova’s Torrent Downloads Double to 7 Billion in a Year
In 2008 the site passed several milestones, and in December Mininova broke a new record of 44.7 million unique visitors in one month. More users download more torrents, and just about every three to four months the site added another million torrent downloads to its counter. Today, just a few days into 2009, Mininova is close to recording the 7 billionth download, a double up compared to a year ago.
Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak that he expects this growth to continue in the new year. “Traffic is still growing according to Quantcast and Google Analytics. Unless something drastically changes, I see no reason why this will be different in 2009,” he commented.
Over the past months we’ve reported on the trend of more artists and publishers taking BitTorrent seriously, and Niek has noticed the same. “That’s definitely true,” he said. “We have almost reached the point of 1000 active CD publishers. We expect that free content distribution will play an increasingly important role in the music and video industry during the coming year.”
While existing Internet users are turning to BitTorrent at an increasing rate, most growth can be expected from rapidly developing countries such as India. With only 5 million broadband Internet subscribers, India is a relatively small player. However, the government plans to increase this number to 50 million by 2012, a 1000% increase, and we expect that many of them will be eager to try BitTorrent.
The exponential growth reported by Mininova and other torrent sites shows us that the BitTorrent hype is far from over. ISPs should brace themselves.
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