The FBI admitted that the online attack that crippled Sony Pictures, resulted in theft of confidential information and leak of unreleased movies to the web would have challenged almost any cyber security measures.

Google decided to shut down its engineering office in Russia. This decision was made because of a new law, which Russian authorities expect will improve data protection. Since next January, the foreign companies will be required to store Russian users’ personal data on servers located in the country. Many believe that such law will just make it harder for American online firms to work in Russia and provide the country’s secret services greater access to data held by foreign companies.

The search giant has delivered a major blow to torrent websites within the last few weeks, and the MPAA was supposed to be happy with Google’s efforts. However, the Motion Picture Association of America criticized the company. This so infuriated Google's top brass that the search engine decided to break its anti-piracy cooperation with the MPAA.

LionsGate was seen attempting to wipe an entire Reddit sub from Google’s indexes. The movie studio claimed that the action was necessary to protect the movie A Madea Christmas. However, the search giant refused to comply with the overbroad takedown attempt.

Millions of DMCA notices are sent to search giants each week: for example, Google received over 8.5 million within the last 7 days. While most of those complaints are accurate, some of them aren’t. As for Google, the company admits that it has to reject thousands of DMCA notices every day, usually because they target the same URLs again and again.

Some of such failure notices can be easily spotted (for example when rights owners target content they don’t actually own the rights to). Sometimes the content creators don’t target infringing material precisely – instead of sending a notice for a single URL, they want to move up a level and take down a whole bunch of them in a single swoop. This is what the movie studio tried to do a few days ago, targeting 9,000 URLs in a single DMCA notice, where dozens of URLs were duplicates. However, Google dismissed links targeting Reddit for different reasons. Three links submitted by LionsGate targeted a Reddit sub called BestOfStreamingVideo after someone published a link to the company’s movie ‘Tyler Perry’s A Madea Christmas‘. The movie studio tried to have the whole sub-reddit delisted from Google, but the search giant refused to comply.

In the meantime, it should be admitted that the “over-broad” strategy has quite paid off in the past. For example, the Motion Pictures Association of America has managed to have the homepages of a number of popular websites removed from Google’s search, including that of KickassTorrents.

The company has filed a lawsuit at a federal court accusing unknown AT&T subscriber(s) of activating pirated copies of its operating system and other software products. The AT&T account was tracked by the tech giant’s own cyberforensics team due to “suspicious activation patterns”.


Although Microsoft is known worldwide as one of the most pirated software vendors, the company doesn’t have a long track record of dealing with individual infringers. Actually, a couple months ago, the company even noted that piracy could sometimes even act as a conversion tool. Apparently, this didn’t mean that all pirates could have their way. The tech giant’s cybercrime center seems to be keeping a close eye on the unauthorized use of Microsoft’s software products.

A few days ago, the company has filed a copyright infringement complaint against an individual (or a group) who activated pirated copies of Windows 7 and Office 10 from an IP address assigned to the AT&T subscription account. You may think that pirated copies are hard for the company to detect, but Microsoft explained that it uses modern technology to track software piracy. The software developer described its investigative approach as cyberforensics: its team looks for activation patterns and characteristics that make it likely that certain IP-addresses are engaged in illegal copying.

For example, the company analyzes product key activation data received from users when they activate the software. This data includes the IP address from which the key has been activated. By the way, such reports are sent by users voluntarily. The lawsuit claims that the defendants have activated numerous copies of Microsoft software products, including Windows 7 and Office 2010, with suspicious registration keys. The company believes that those were stolen from its supply chain, then used without permission from the refurbisher channel, and more often than the Microsoft license permitted.

Now the company wants the court to allow it to identify the individual or a group of them responsible for the copyright violations in order to compensate the damage it has suffered. According to Microsoft’s complaint, it looks like the defendant is not an average user, but perhaps a person selling PCs with pirated software. Well, let’s see what the court has to tell the company.

FBI confirmed that Sony Pictures employees still receive threats via email after the movie studio’s computer network was hacked. In the meantime, the attack appears to be linked to a hotel in Bangkok, Thailand. Those emails threaten employees into disavowing the company to prevent further attacks.

The attackers ask the recipients to sign their names to object the false of the company if they don’t want to suffer damage. They go on saying that if the employees don’t, not only them but their families will be in danger.

In the meantime, the Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed that they are aware of threatening emails the employees of the corporation receive. The police continue to investigate the issue trying to identify those responsible for the attack, during which plenty of confidential data, such as usernames, passwords, email addresses, payment details and social security numbers were stolen. It is now believed that the attack originated from a 5-star hotel in the center of Bangkok, Thailand.

Security experts admit that the threats to the employees of the suffered company could have been sent from copycats or any person who had access to the information leaked online via file-sharing services. The representatives of the company confirmed that the email claimed to be from “GOP” – this name was used by the Guardians of Peace hacking group, which is believed to be the initial attacker who stole the data.

Investigations of the police and Sony are still ongoing. They already mooted the North Korea’s involvement over the release of the movie The Interview by Sony, as it depicts an attempt to assassinate Kim Jong-un. The country denied its involvement in the attack.