France's official P2P monitoring firm hacked The French government has temporarily suspended its reliance on the company designated to monitor file-sharing networks for copyright scofflaws following reports that a hack on its servers may have leaked sensitive information. Eric Walter, France's secretary general of internet piracy, made the announcement over Twitter on …
Hard to call this a hack when the leaked data was available with a simple browser pointed to the right IP address. Call this a massive fail on TMG's side and it'll be more accurate, with the added bonus that they won't be seen as poor victims of some uber-pirate, but only of their own incompetence.
And the 'This is a test server' argument is moot. Are the leaked IP addresses (there are some if the original reporters are right, see http://reflets.info/le-honeypot-de-tmg/) only test addresses belonging to test citizens? I doubt it…
Unfortunately, that is the way it goes on the Internet these days.
If you leave your front door open and someone comes in and swipes your car keys, it's all your fault, but if a company leaves a server wide open and someone pings it, it's a hack and the judges have a ton of bricks ready.
Somehow, I think there's going to have to be a change somewhere down the line. After all, the Internet is a place where it is inevitable to find someone who's going to try to hack you, whereas I could leave my front door open for a week in my little French village and I'd still have my car keys after that.
Not that I do leave my door open, mind you.
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