Hollywood will provide technological advice and support, as well as helping identify the websites that provide illegal downloads.

“American business is under attack from counterfeiters and pirates,” Immigration and Customs’ Assistant Secretary John Morton said at the press conference. “Internet crooks threaten the U.S. economy on a grand scale.”

To prove the point, the announcement was made at the Disney Studios in Burbank, where Morton was joined by senior representatives from major movie studios, such as Walt Disney Studios President Alan Bergman and Paramount Chief Operating Officer Frederick Huntsberry, entertainment unions and the Motion Picture Association of America.

The message stressed by all the press conferences participants was that piracy was rising and threatened the livelihoods of everyone from those in corporate boardrooms to below the line workers by depriving the U.S. economy of some $20.5 billion annually in lost output.

The initiative’s first action was to seize nine domain names of websites that were offering first-run movies, often within hours of their theatrical release. Among the sites targetted by the inaugural investigation were TVShack.net, Movies-links.tv, Filespump.com, Now-movies.com, PlanetMoviez.com, PirateCity.org and zml.com, NinjaVideo.net, and NinjaThis.net. Officials said Wednesday that those sites had attracted 6.7 million visitors in a single month.

Officials said that those sites are no longer operating and that visitors will now encounter a banner announcing that law enforcement agencies has shut down the sites because they were trafficking in illegal downloads (as of 1:00 p.m. PST, however, some of these sites still appeared to be operational). ”I don’t think that these moves stopped internet piracy in a day, but this is going to be a sustained effort,” Morton said.

Law enforcement officials said that these investigations were targeted specifically at the people running bit torrent sites, but that indicated that in the future they may widen their gaze to include individuals who download films and television shows illegally. While the nine sites shut down on Wednesday were all operating in the United States, Morton said that the agencies involved in the new initiative had jurisdiction in 44 countries.

“This battle won’t be won in the United States. We’ll have to wage it globally,” Morton said.

Seven of those sites were targeted by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. In addition, agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s  Homeland Security Investigations seized assets associated with these sites from 15 bank, Paypal, investment and advertising accounts. It also executed four residential search warrants in several states.

Officials would not say if any arrests had been made, but said that site operators could face jail time. Working undercover, investigators downloaded various newly released movies from the websites and their affiliates. Over the course of the investigation, agents observed links to more than 200 movies and more than 300 television programs on NinjaVideo.

Asked about the potential problems that might arise with partnering so heavily with industry, Morton said, “This is a great national industry. When industry is victimized, they should be treated no differently than an individual who is victimized on the corner of Fourth and Main.”

The new initiative also represents a more comprehensive effort to prosecute downloaders or pirates, rather than the piecemeal approach to prosecution that already exists. For instance, with regards to the seizures and closures announced Wednesday, the class of sites identified were all link sites.

The initiative makes good on a promise made by Vice President Joe Biden earlier this month. On June 22, Biden unveiled the White House’s strategic plan to increase intellectual-property enforcement. “Piracy is theft,” he said at the time. “It is smash-and-grab, no different from smashing a window at Tiffany.”

On Sunday Damballa researchers grabbed control of the C&C domain, but they say this is likely just one of many versions of the rogue Windows 7 OS: “In this case, we neutralized one release version of the Trojan’ed OS,” Cox says. “So if users have an older version and install it, we’ve neutralized it from downloading additional malware.”

Cox says the main goal of the Trojan tucked into the pirated OS is to add additional malware packages to the victims’ machines in a “pay-per-install” scheme, where the software piracy ring makes money from cybercrime groups who pay them to successfully install the malware. “The pirated software is the social enticement initially, and the second state is downloading additional packages of malware installed and distributed [via] the Trojan on a pay-per-install [arrangement],” Cox says.

Windows 7 has, indeed, become the newest lure: Trend Micro researchers have reported a Trojan downloader posing as a copy of the Windows 7 Release Candidate on popular torrent sites. The Trojan appears as a file called “setup.exe” when users download what they think is the Windows 7 RC. The Trojan, dubbed “TROJ DROPPER.SPX” by Trend Micro, downloads TROJ AGENT.NICE, both of which can be detected by Trend Micro’s Smart Protection Network.

Meanwhile, software piracy is on the rise, especially in the U.S., according to a report released yesterday by the Business Software Alliance and IDC. One-fifth of all PC software in the U.S. is pirated, which is the lowest rate in the world, according to the report. But the U.S. also boasts the biggest losses from piracy, at about $9.1 billion, according to the report. And most of the bots in the pirated Windows 7 OS scheme are in the U.S., according to Damballa, with about 10 percent of the bots, followed by 7 percent in both the Netherlands and Italy.

Damballa’s Cox says most traditional antivirus software is unable to detect the pirated Windows 7 Trojan because the OS itself is infected, and because most antivirus solutions don’t yet support Windows 7. “We continue to see new installs happening at a rate of about 1,600 per day with broad geographic distribution,” Cox says. “Since our takedown, any new installs of this pirated distribution of Windows 7 RC are inaccessible by the botmaster. The old installs are accessible.”

The actual Windows 7 Release Candidate can be downloaded from Microsoft here.

The word “brick” has many meanings. For basketball players, it’s used to describe the sound of a badly missed shot. And for iPhone owners who tried to sneak an early copy of the developers-only beta software, it means that their $300-smartphone has been reduced to an expensive paperweight. Apple showed off the next version of the iPhone software last week, which was made immediately available to members of its third-party developer program.

Application coders, who pay the $99 membership fee, get access to new features, including copy-and-paste, multimedia messaging, voice note recording and text-note syncing. The idea is to give developers a few months to test the nuances of the firmware and build new features into their apps. The software update will be available to the general public (free for the iPhone and $10 for the iPod Touch) in the summer. But some couldn’t wait and decided to snatch the beta from the many piracy websites that offer it for download.

Many were shocked when they hit a brick wall. After the update process, iTunes connects to Apple’s servers and attempts to… verify whether your iPhone or iPod Touch is registered as a developer’s device. If not, users are asked to join the developer program — or else. If you refuse, your pricey gadget is, as they say, “bricked.” It asks you to connect to iTunes, but when you do so there’s no escape. Because the firmware modifies certain files within the phone, you cannot downgrade to a previous version, third-party developers say. Folks who hoped to get a free ticket to the early release of iPhone 3.0 are expressing remorse across the Web.

iWork ’09:

Mac security software maker Intego discovered last week what it calls “OSX.Trojan.iServices.A” in pirated copies of Apple’s iWork ’09 making the rounds on BitTorrent file sharing networks.  An additional package not found in retail copies of the iWork installer called “iWorkServices.pkg” is installed as a startup item with read/write/execute abilities with the pirated versions. According to Intego, the rogue software connects to a remote server to notify its creator that the trojan has been installed on different Macs, and he or she can “connect to them and perform various actions remotely”, including downloading additional components to the machine.

Intego considers the risk of infection to be serious, warning of “extremely serious consequences” if a user’s Mac is compromised by software. The security firm said 20,000 people had already downloaded the installer at the time of its alert.  As of now, Intego counts 1,000 more since the initial warning. In an update on the matter Monday morning, Intego said Macs infected with the trojan are being pushed new code that downloads in the background, which is then being used to facilitate a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack on certain websites.

Photoshop CS4:

As part of its update, Intego also says it has discovered a new variant of the same Trojan horse called “OSX.Trojan.iServices.B”, which can be found in pirated versions of Adobe Photoshop CS4.  This installer has already been downloaded by 5,000 people who are now at risk, the firm says. This installer compromises the system not by installing an additional package, but through a crack application that serializes the program for use without a purchased retail key.  This app extracts an executable from its data and installs a backdoor in /var/tmp/.  If the user runs the crack app again, a new executable with a different random name is created, making it difficult to safely remove the malware.

Once the administrator password is entered, a backdoor with root privileges is launched, copying the executable to /usr/bin/DivX and a startup item in /System/Library/StartupItems/DivX.  It then makes repeated connections to two IP addresses, according to Intego. A malicious user can then connect to the affected Macs and perform various actions and downloads remotely.  Intego predicts this Trojan horse may also be used to execute similar DDoS attacks.

Warning:

As a result of these two very serious risks, Intego is warning Mac users not to download any cracking software from sites that distribute it.

“The risk of infection is serious, due to the number of infected users, and these users may face extremely serious consequences if their Macs are accessible to malicious users,” reads a notice on the security firm’s website.

Intego recommends that users never download and install software from untrusted sources or questionable websites.  It says its own VirusBarrier X4 and X5 products with virus definitions dated January 22, 2009, or later will protect against these two Trojan horses. This just goes to show that not even the almighty Macs are immune to viruses these days and as Apple’s line of computers continues to get more popular, these hackers will start to produce more viruses for them as it is starting to be worth it to infect Apple computers! So be safe out there on the internet and make sure you have a decent antivirus program protecting you always!

Four computers with burners and more than 1,000 illegally copied games were seized in the raid – including 700 Xbox 360 games, 300 Wii titles and 100 PlayStation 2 games. Three Xbox 360 and two Nintendo Wii consoles were also seized. The man admitted to running an illegal chipping operation via his Gumtree.com site for nearly two years.

Michael Rawlinson, managing director of ELSPA, has said “Our team in the Intellectual Property Crime Unit (IPCU) will step up its fight against counterfeiters and illegal chipping services in 2009. Such illegal activity can pose real health dangers for the public and certainly deprives gamers of any proper quality control. Furthermore, it can cause the industry to lose vital income and with it jobs across the UK. “ A POCA (Proceeds Of Crime Act) investigation has already begun to estimate the criminal gain from the offender’s illegal activities. The crime itself carries up to ten year’s imprisonment, and an unlimited fine.

It seems that this is going to be the first of many as companies are going to be cracking down on pirates and hackers that look to profit off of stolen software and/or video games. There will be more… so for you all out there that have an interest in this or do it from day to day… be warned that they are on the loose trying to hunt you down and catch you! So play safe online everyone!

One of its victims, who got the trojan from downloading a torrent from The Pirate Bay, contacted TorrentFreak. He told us: “I didn’t follow the well established rules of downloading. It was a file with a low number of seeds, many leechers and no comments. I’ve downloaded the file and didn’t visit the torrent page again to view if there were any negative comments.” It turned out that the trojan originated from a keygen supplied with a copy of pirated software. Instead of generating a key, it modified the hosts file of the computer so that it redirects The Pirate Bay, Suprbay (The Pirate Bay forums) and Mininova to 127.0.0.1, which means that the sites never load.

Aside from blocking the three sites in question, the trojan caused popups and even played a sound file saying that “downloading is wrong”. The bad torrent was removed from The Pirate Bay soon after users commented that the key generator didn’t work, but it is safe to assume that this is not the first and only attempt to spread a trojan like this one. The question remains, who is behind this? While some might argue that the MPAA, RIAA or other anti-piracy advocates might be the source, we think it more likely that the attack originates from a relatively innocent prankster targeting pirates.

The good news is that it is fairly easy to fix, manually removing the entries from the hosts file solves the problem. “Overall a bad experience, but the computer is fine now,” the affected user told us. Advice and tips about the Windows Hosts file can be found here.

The Pirate Bay has established itself as the largest BitTorrent tracker, and helps to distribute millions of files a day. Yesterday, the Pirate Bay team adds yet another service to its arsenal, a free video converter that allows users to put their favorite movies and TV shows on almost every mobile device.

With the wide range of video formats out there, it can be quite a challenge to find a tool that can easily convert these to a format that is supported by your mobile device. The Pirate Bay, one of the greatest video libraries online, now has an application that does just this.

The ViO converter reduces AVI, MPEG, MP4, WMV and others videos to 20% of its original size without any reduction in image quality, and claims to do it faster than any other converter. The tool is completely free and comes with pre-configured settings for the most wisely used mobile devices, including the iPod, iPhone and BlackBerry.

The converter can be downloaded for free, but strangely enough a .torrent is not available. The ViO website is currently accessible at a subdomain of The Pirate Bay, complete with a nifty marketing pitch claiming that “ViO proprietary compression delivers better video quality, higher resolution and smaller file sizes, than anything else on the market today.”

When ViO is installed there is an optional toolbar that can be installed with it. The application itself is easy to use, and does indeed a good (and fast) job at converting different video files we’ve tried. If this takes off, it might even reduce the number of pirated downloads of some of the commercial alternatives. Some readers noted that ViO violates the GPL for at least 2 projects, The Pirate Bay will put the source online to resolve this issue.

#	Game	Downloads
1	Spore	1,700,000
2	The Sims 2	1,150,000
3	Assassins Creed	1,070,000
4	Crysis	940,000
5	Command & Conquer 3	860,000
6	Call of Duty 4	830,000
7	GTA San Andreas	740,000
8	Fallout 3	645,000
9	Far Cry 2	585,000
10	Pro Evolution Soccer 2009	470,000

Ok, so there it is. Many people claim that the reason Spore hit the #1 spot so quickly was because of the stupid DRM that EA Games put into it only allowing you to re-install a couple of times. To battle this a lot of people have boycotted EA buy starting to pirate their games to show their protest. When EA was asked why they put such a DRM onto the game, they said it was to “Protect their software from piracy”. Well… ok it seems to have worked really well there guys! Good work!