This story reads like something from one of those glamourised Hollywood ‘hacker’ movies like Swordfish or Antitrust.

The legendary MPAA hacker has been revealed, and it looks like he himself got social engineered and dumped…he should have realised when you are playing with unscrupulous people you are setting yourself up to get screwed.

Promises of Hollywood fame and fortune persuaded a young hacker to betray former associates in the BitTorrent scene to Tinseltown’s anti-piracy lobby, according to the hacker.

In an exclusive interview with Wired News, gun-for-hire hacker Robert Anderson tells for the first time how the Motion Picture Association of America promised him money and power if he provided confidential information on TorrentSpy, a popular BitTorrent search site.

According to Anderson, the MPAA told him: “We would need somebody like you. We would give you a nice paying job, a house, a car, anything you needed…. if you save Hollywood for us you can become rich and powerful.”

Promised him everything he’d dreamed of eh? Then in the end…fascinating read anyway.

But once Anderson turned over the data and cashed the MPAA’s check, he quickly realized that Garfield had no further use for him. “He lost interest in me,” he says. Anderson felt abandoned: During negotiations with Garfield, the hacker had become convinced he was starting a long-term, lucrative relationship with the motion picture industry. “He was stringing me along personally.”

Hollywood’s cold shoulder put Anderson’s allegiance back up for grabs, and about a year later he came clean with TorrentSpy’s Bunnell in an online chat. “‘I sold you out to the MPAA,’” Anderson says he told Bunnell. “I felt guilty (for) what happened and I kinda also thought at that point the MPAA wasn’t going to do anything.”

Some pretty tricky business..so if you are a hacker for hire, you’d better be careful who you are dealing with.

Source: Wired

It didn’t take them long! A while ago some smart chaps worked out the a way to extract the HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc “volume keys” to decrypt AACS DRM on individual films (This was about 2 months ago).

Now they have cracked the scheme behind it, the so called “processing key” used to decrypt the DRM on all HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc films.

The copy protection technology used by Blu-ray discs has been cracked by the same hacker who broke the DRM technology of rival HD DVD discs last month. The coder known as muslix64 used much the same plain text attack in both cases. By reading a key held in memory by a player playing a HD DVD disc he was able to decrypt the movie been played and render it as an MPEG 2 file.

The latest Blu-ray hack was performed by muslix64 using a media file provided by Janvitos, through the video resource site Doom9, and applied to a Blu-ray copy of the movie Lord of War. In this case, muslix64 didn’t even need access to a Blu-ray player to nobble the DRM protection included on the title.

Nice eh, the guy doesn’t even HAVE a Blu-ray drive or player, yet he still managed to crack the screen by playing from a Blu-ray image file!

These DRM guys better buck up their ideas as they are getting owned all over the place, remember when the DVD encryption was cracked in a similar way, by Xing-Mpeg player keeping the key in plain text in memory.

Both HD DVD and Blu-ray use HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) for playback display authentication and similar implementations of AACS (Advanced Access Content System) for content encryption.

The hack sidesteps, rather than defeats, the AACS encryption used as part of the content protection technology used by both next-generation DVD formats. The approach relies on obtaining a particular movie’s unique “key” and can’t therefore be trivially replicated to rip content across all titles encoded via a particular format, as tools like DVD Decryptor make easy with standard DVD titles.

muslix64 has however posted a 18KB tool that allows other to try their hand at extracting the keys of other Blu-ray Disc movies

Source: The Register