French Anti-P2P Outfit Leaked Users Data Online

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Trident Media Guard’s servers have suffered hacker attack, which resulted in leak of IP addresses of individuals suspected of unauthorized downloading. While the government suspends ties with the company until the end of the investigation of the breach, the only anti-P2P outfit forwarding IP addresses of alleged pirates suspends the French graduated response system.

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Trident Media Guard, the company tasked with tracking down Internet file-sharers under the country’s “three-strikes” legislation, experienced quite an embarrassing information leak late last week. In result, the country’s government has taken the decision to suspend interconnection with the company for while. Consequently, it caused a suspension of the French “three-strikes” law.

Within the breach, over 5,000 archive files from the firm’s server has leaked, most of them being .html files containing hash files monitored on BitTorrent networks. The interesting part of this is that some of the files date back 3 years ago, which automatically raises questions about data retention times.

After the breach, the HADOPI’s secretary general (High Authority for the Protection of Works on the Internet) made an announcement that as a precaution the authority took a decision to temporarily suspend its ties with Trident Media Guard. In other words, the firm will be unable to forward IP addresses for a while, which means that HADOPI’s actions will be limited to only the addresses received before the incident.

In their attempts to clarify the situation, the Commission on Human Rights Protection and HADOPI are expected to meet with Trident Media Guard in the near future. They are going to determine whether the firm should adopt a “protocol of technical expertise” in order to be able to protect user information in the future.

In response, Trident Media Guard has played down the leak, arguing that no confidential or personal data has been leaked online. Instead, they claim it was data located at a test server related to R&D department of the company, which means that no infrastructure used by the firm for its operations of tracking down accused IP addresses have been impacted.

The incident is just another reminder of the “three-strikes” system’s shortcomings, particularly considering that it has only caused no more than 3.5% to quit unauthorized file-sharing.
 
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