Hackers hit French ‘piracy’ monitoring firm

GALLIC COPYRIGHT ENFORCER Trident Media Guard (TMG), a firm that monitors internet activity for the French government, has been hacked by people that take a strong dislike to that sort of thing.

The BBC reports that Trident Media Guard offers clandestine snooping tools and monitors peer to peer networks. The information that it hoovers up is then passed on to the French government, which is to digital liberty what La Guillotine was to toffs.

It appears that some of this information was stored on an insecure server that, as you might expect, was easy to hack and held fruit in the form of data that was easy to plunder.

The hack is similar to those performed at ACS:Law, at least in its intention, and here, like in that earlier case, some personal information has been purloined. Eric Walter, head of the French anti-piracy unit, has confirmed that it has suspended links, at least temporarily, with TMG.

France has a three strikes and you are out approach to tackling illegal downloading, which the UK government covets, and its Hadopi laws have garnered as much controversy as our own Digital Economy Act rules. µ