Are you an out-of-work hacker angry at the world/some guy from TorrentSpy who wouldn’t let you do some ridiculous ad thing? Want to make over $4,999? Then send the MPAA an email. They’ll pay you $5,000 for secret information about TorrentSpy (Hacker: “They use PHP and Apache.” Hollywood: “Is that special code for stealing movies?” Hacker: “Yes.”). You’ll become hated by everyone in the world ! Best of all, you’ll learn a valuable lesson: don’t trust the man.
Generally, this story sounds like a four pounds on feces in a one pound bag. The gist of the story is simple: an angry hacker, Robert Anderson, quits working on TorrentSpy and sends a random email to the MPAA. The MPAA pays him $5,000 for secret information. They also want Anderson to make fake BitTorrent sites. Finally, Wired has an exclusive story that seems like someone is taking someone for a ride. Take this, for example:
Anderson didn’t tell Garfield he was the “informant,” and that he’d already hacked into TorrentSpy’s systems. The hacker, then 23 and living in Vancouver, British Columbia, claims he had cracked TorrentSpy’s servers by simply guessing an administrative password. He knew the password was weak — a combination of a name and some numbers.
“I just kept changing the numbers until it fit,” he says. “I guess you can call it luck. It took a little more than 30 tries.
I mean it’s possible that this happened, but it sounds like FUD and/or someone screwing with the author. The story ended up with the hacker, Anderson, apologizing to the TorrentSpy guys after promise of Hollywood hacker stardom vanished. Anderson then went to court to sue the MPAA for illegal wiretapping. The case is ongoing and let’s hope this is the last time a youngster is drawn to Hollywood with the lure of stardom and riches and ends up getting screwed, literally and/or figuratively.