This is not good news for the News Corp owned Myspace. Myspace has had its fair share of privacy concerns in the past. But this major leak puts all of them to shame. Over half a million photos have been leaked on BitTorrent, and the catch here is that all the leaked photos have been taken from private albums on Myspace.
Well that just made just about everyone’s private moments for the whole world wide web to see. This sets a very bad precedent for Myspace, and I am sure we’d be seeing some big legal battles on this.
The creator of the file says he used the Myspace Security hole that was revealed last week by Wired, and while he created this 17GB of a file, just to demonstrate that this could be done, and he believes that a lot more of others could be using it for more nefarious purposes.
The security hole was closed last week after the Wired report, but by then DMaul (the creator of this file) had run an automated script to run through over 44,000 private Myspace profiles and extract all the private pictures out of them. He has rolled these images over into a Zip archive and released it on the Piratebay, advertising the torrent with a tagline saying Pictures taken exclusively from Private Profiles.
Well I just popped onto Piratebay and as of now the torrent has 7 Seeders, with nearly 1000 people downloading the torrent. Here are a few comments from the torrent for you :
bygtyme69r : why did you zip 17GBS?? it will take weeks or months to DL
twdmaul : I had to zip it. nothing plays well with that many files. it was very difficult to handle. i will have additional seeds on monday. should take no longer than 5 days to get it fully spread.
TheKogut : Just be patient, kids. We’re all sitting on this thing, and soon enough it will get distributed.
This is a significant breach into Myspace, and the saddest thing is that News Corp hasn’t yet come up with an explanation on this one yet. I had this story running as a draft the whole day yesterday waiting for someone like Techcrunch or Mashable to pick up this, but sadly no one did.
Does this mean, that we blogger’s don’t care. I personally take this breach very seriously, and it shows that Internet however private place it claims to be, it just doesn’t cut it. What depresses me more, is that no major media outlet took this news out and gave it the fire it deserves.
Do we all grown ups really like outsiders looking at the private pictures of our Kids? Thats one question I would like to ask all of you.
And for obvious reasons, please don’t comment asking me where you could find the torrent. I won’t tell you where it is, because it isn’t meant to be shared. Come on guys, show some decency..
Via Wired
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Cacodaemon
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Randy
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Unknown
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Anirudh