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January 24, 2008 by pmelcher.

500,000 images stolen in 94 hours, resulting in a 17 gigabyte file, available, for free, as a Bittorrent download. Anyone wants to start a free photo agency ? Granted, the content might not be very interesting..

According to this article in Wired magazine, a hacker gained access to the private sites of Myspace users and retrieved password protected images.

” …DMaul, a denizen of the online forum TribalWar.com who declined to reveal his name, used an automated script to run nearly 44,000 MySpace user profiles through one of the ad-supported sites, MySpacePrivateProfile.com — a process he says took about 94 hours. He rolled those images into a single file and seeded it to The Pirate Bay, a popular BitTorrent tracking site, on Sunday, advertising it as “pictures taken exclusively from private profiles.”

Myspace, which is owned by Newscorp, knew apparently about this hole. But it makes you wonder. Is your website safe ? Do you know where your images are right now ? all of them ? Imagine if the same “incident” happened to a Getty or Corbis ? Or worse, to a microstock RF agency who would have an impossible time finding out if a usage is legitimate or not.

Posted in web 2.0, copyright, technology, filter, finance, Royalty free, getty, Microstock | Print | 1 Comment »