Was Japan cop Winny Virus victim?
p2pnet news view | crime:- News that a policeman in Japan has been fired for allowing important documents to leak onto the Net – documents including the names and addresses of the “notorious Yamaguchi-gumi yakuza criminal gang” – is being greeted by varying degrees of scorn and hilarity.
But was he, in fact, a victim of the dreaded Winny Virus?
A p2pnet comment post says, “It’s humorous seeing this article plaster across sites like this , the Register, etc,” going on >>>>
The reason I say this, is that this is not the first occurrence of this sort of thing, here in Japan.
The thing that most of the articles miss, is the fact that this policeman, as well of many of the other dingbats that have ended up leaking sensitive information on the Internet, did so by not only using the Winny P2P application, but by installing it on a departmental notebook PC, and taking the notebook PC home and accessing the net from a local carrier(of course this is strictly prohibited by the both the Japanese police and the self defence forces, but it happened none the less).
This enhanced by the fact that most of the illegal breaches came as a result of a virus propagated over the Winny P2P network, which takes a screen shot of your desktop, bundles the files in the My documents folder, scan the HDD for images, and then uploads them to the Winny network and or several famous uploading sites.
The virus is often propagated through Adult oriented files, as well as popular movie screeners, which means that there is a high possibility that these people downloaded ‘illegal’ files in the first place to get infected.
No matter how you explain it, this is a result of stupidity and the police and military, here in Japan… because it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that you should use AV software, and not hook computer with sensitive information, to a public network.
The sad thing about this, is that this embarrassment to the police and military, has cause them to go on a personal vendetta against P2P applications in general, trying to shift the blame of their ignorance to the P2P applications, and gaining a strong ally in the Entertainment cartels and software businesses, here in Japan.
This has even fuelled speculation, that the Virus was developed by the Entertainment cartel to gain political support.
Doesn’t this tactic remind you of a similar tactic happening in other parts of the world?
It does indeed.
Also See:
Yamaguchi-gumi yakuza – Japan cop leaked yakuza info online, July 20, 2007
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July 22nd, 2007 at 7:29 pm
On a side note…
Another thing that the press missed on this Winny based virus, was it’s name, the “Kintama virus” (translated… well let’s just say it’s a slang term with the similar conotations of “balls”).
It is said, that the origeonal version of this virus was made to take a screenshot of your desktop and collect porn from the users computer (of course there is no way for a virus to tell the difference between porn, and non-porn, so all jpgs and gifs, pngs were colected). This combined with the fact that the virus was mostly found in porn files, is said to be the reson for the name (the virus was motivated by the Male lower extremeties).
Later, as variations of the virus started to pop up, the virus was modified to collect personal document files, emails, etc… (cue lame Police men and military men). As a result, the “kintama” virus put on a completely new meaning, from “thinking with it’s balls” to “gotcha by YOUR balls”.
There is however, a group of people who feel that this virus has had some good come out of it.
“What? Some good from a virus?” you may say, but due to publication of personal files on the P2P network and web, several large scale scandals have figuratively “hit the fan”, reveiling misuse of governmental funds, and have resulted in several pubilc inquiries of corperate business prectices.
Hummm… I wonder what would happen, if any one of the **AAs, their henchment, or their lawers ever was infected by this Virus… Not that I am saying that someone should infect them… But I can’t help to wonder if their PC’s could talk, what horrible tales they might speak…
Just my two cents