UCD team suspects 65,000 of weekly illegal downloading

ALMOST 65,000 broadband users in Ireland are suspected of being involved in illegal downloading on a weekly basis.

In the first comprehensive survey of the extent of illegal downloading in Ireland, the UCD Centre for Cybercrime Investigation (CCI) was able to identify the IP address of 64,152 users who are suspected of breach of copyright last week alone.

The full extent of illegal downloading may be much greater because researchers were only trying to trace the top 100 most popular items which are downloaded through BitTorrent swarms, one of the most efficient ways of illegal downloading.

The list includes contemporary movies such as Avatar, Invictus and The Princess and the Frog which have not been released on DVD yet; TV series such as Grey’s Anatomy; popular albums such as Lady GaGa’s The Fame Monster; and the computer game BioShock.

Although BitTorrent can be used for legal downloading, it is mostly used for illegal filesharing such as sharing music, film and computer games through the peer to peer (p2p) process.

In a BitTorrent swarm, an internet user might obtain an illegal copy of the film Avatar and disseminate it among other internet users who each send part of the film to speed up the process of sending such a large file.

CCI researcher Alan Hannaway said they were able to identify the potential illegal users by developing software which was faster and more accurate than any used before to identify illegal downloading.

“We took our core research and tweaked it so it would work on these networks and we have a system that can very quickly identify with a certain level of accuracy the peers that are showing these contents at any point in time.

“This was originally a piece of research.

“We didn’t think that this would have a commercial application, but we have interest from companies that have lost money because of illegal downloading.”

The CCI was set up in 2006 as one of the first places in Europe to offer a formal academic approach to and to carry out research into cybercrime.

The centre has succeeded in getting €4.5 million from the European Commission to help co-ordinate the setting-up of a cybercrime investigation unit in every EU country.

Prof Joe Carthy from CCI said it had a legitimate expectation of becoming the European centre for fighting cybercrime in the future.

“We will be advocating support for that concept that Ireland should be the natural place because of the lead role we have in cybercrime training and education, but that is a battle which still has to be fought,” he said.

Minister for Justice and Law Reform Dermot Ahern, who visited the centre yesterday, said that the Government would support the CCI in its attempts to become a European hub.

“I’m delighted to hear that Ireland is at the leading edge of research and ahead of the posse and that has been acknowledged by the European Commission, the Minister said.

“We have a reputation as a nation of being excellent at software technology.”