A rchive Date
[ 27-01-2001 ]
Category
[ Information Technologies ]
sub-Categoy
[ Networking ]
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[WAREZ the Problem?
Like a mysterious secret society, the Warez network occupies dozens of semi-hidden nooks and crannies on the Web. Just who are they? And what do they want? Here's one look at the infamous organisation of hackers and crackers.
By Hakimuddin Badshah, CHIP, ZDNetIndia
Warez (pronounced 'wares') is a slang on the Net used to describe pirated software. Some guys - mostly brilliant programmers and smart college students - remove copy protection from commercial software and make them available on the Internet as free downloads.
Finding warez is an easy task. A quick search in Google reveals 507,000 sites catering to users of pirated software. Though many of these are fronts for pornographic sites, quite a few are full-fledged warez sites. Because trading in pirated software is illegal, these Web sites keep changing hosts and URLs as many as three times a month.
However, as soon as one warez site moves or closes down, messages pointing to new locations start appearing almost immediately on Usenet groups. Businesses and universities inadvertently become hosts for warez.
A cracker will find and exploit weaknesses in the server to host his site and will then create folders buried deep within the server and copy warez into those servers. Crackers also find gullible hosts in countries with lax anti-piracy laws (such as China and Russia). India is still shielded from this problem because of the poor infrastructure - after all, the warez sites need server space and bandwidth in large quantities.
Cracks, which are very small and take up little server space, are also a favourite among competing cracking groups as developing a crack requires a high aptitude in computer science, which means that the cracker has to be a brilliant coder (something most of these groups boast about). A clever programmer using commonly available tools like Hex Editors and Disassemblers can break time limited or demo versions of software. Cracks are much easier to find than warez sites.
There are at least 23 crack search engines on the Net and most of these claim to be updated daily. For example, Opera 5.0 was released on December 6, 2000 and a crack was available the next day itself. These sites stay alive on advertisement revenues (mostly from porn sites) and earn-by-page views. Cracks as such are not illegal (after all, they are just a piece of code), which is why sites that distribute cracks are more stable and hang around longer than warez sites. But their use is definitely illegal.
Similar to cracks are Keygens (Key Generators), which generate valid serial numbers that will probably work on a current version. A keygen works by using the same mathematical algorithm that the software manufacturer uses to generate a serial number. It is based on the letters of your name. To counter the threat from these pirates in an organised fashion, software developers such as Macromedia and Adobe have formed a group called Business Software Alliance (BSA). But there's very little these companies can do except for alerting the authorities. Not releasing demo software isn't a solution as this drives away many potential customers. Also, software companies know that for the most part, hackers are not potential customers anyway.
So, why does a hacker do what he does? In the words of hackers, it is "because we can", or for "the thrill of it". These crackers are not without honour though. While surfing their newsgroups you will invariably come across statements like "Here is the crack... but the program is a real work of art so please pay the author because he really deserves it."]
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