November 28, 2007
Report Says MPAA's Piracy-Monitoring Software Can Expose Student Data to Hackers
A Washingtonpost.com blogger got some security experts to take a close look at the software that the Motion Picture Association of America is offering to college administrators to track illegal movie downloading on campus. And the analysis uncovered some troubling details.
The movie-industry group sent a letter in October to college presidents at 25 institutions it identified as hotbeds of piracy asking them to use software it developed called University Toolkit. The software includes tools that analyzes traffic on a campus network looking for suspicious downloading activity.
The Washingtonpost.com report says that in his tests using the program in its default settings, the program loaded statistics about campus-network traffic to a Web page that was not well protected from hackers, unless college officials made sure to protect it with a firewall or set up a password.
Angela B. Martinez, vice president for corporate communications at the MPAA, said in an interview Wednesday that the organization has worked quickly to address the issues raised in the report. For instance, now the software is set so that it requires users to enter a password in order to see data reports. “It’s important to note that the program is in beta,” she added. —Jeffrey R. Young
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