Here's how iTunes helped bring down Kickass Torrents

Whatever your stand on digital piracy may be, it’s impossible to deny the popularity of torrent sites across the globe. No doubt, one of the biggest players currently in the game is Kickass Torrents (KAT), though that may not last much longer.

KAT’s owner, 30-year-old Ukranian Artem Vaulin was today arrested in Poland, and with him likely goes his torrent legacy. And all of that because he made a legal music purchase on iTunes. Allow us to elaborate.

Vaulin, or “tirm” as he’s known online, has been running the torrent website since he founded it in 2008. Later in 2015, after The Pirate Bay was shut down and its three founders arrested, KAT replaced it to become the world’s largest supplier of illegally downloaded content. But, with the website transferring content in the range of US $1 billion, law enforcement was absolutely on his tail. They just didn’t know where to find him.

Enter Jared Der-Yeghiayan, a special agent with the US Department of Homeland Security, tasked with tracking down Vaulin and gathering evidence to put him away. In the official criminal complaint filed against Vaulin, the agent details the cohesive operation to bring down the culprit, and it’s a doozy.

Sowing the seeds

Starting in November 2015, an undercover IRS agent spoke with a KAT representative, in order to host an ad on individual torrents listed on the website. At US $300 a day the price wasn’t cheap, but the large sums of money generated for KAT from those advertisements was exactly what law enforcement was after. That income, totalling US $31 million, was tracked to a Latvian bank account.

In addition, the negotiations for the ad campaign being conducted over email gave the agents an important piece of the puzzle; an official email address pr@kat.cr. Law enforcement found that the same email account was linked to KAT’s social media accounts, including its Facebook page. But we’ll get to that in a second.

Next Der-Yeghiayan used a reverse DNS search to find the hosts of seven website domains apparently related to KAT. This pulled up two IP addresses in Chicago,that were used as KAT name servers. The agents then filed warrants to gain access to the server's logs

On a different track Homeland Security also investigated the domain of a website that redirected people to KAT. Their search came up with the name, address, email and phone number of the person to whom the site was registered, thus identifying Vaulin.

So now that the agency knew who they were looking for, it was time for irreproachable evidence. The agents were able to discover that the registered email address shared the same owner as an Apple email address, which is where irony raises its cruel head.

Reaping the benefits

On July 31 2015, records gleaned from an Apple inquiry showed that the email account in question was used to purchase something on iTunes. Server logs also indicated that the same IP address was used to access KAT’s Facebook page that very day, thus irreversibly tying Vaulin to the website. In addition, a huge sum of over US $72,000, shortly after KAT began accepting Bitcoin donations, was transferred into a digital wallet linked to that Apple ID.

With all the evidence in place, the US can’t wait to have Vaulin extradited, and plan to prosecute him for criminal copyright infringement and money laundering. Meanwhile, the seven KAT domains identified in the report are going to be seized. Though the website undoubtedly has various proxies, it’s only a matter of time before another stalwart in torrenting fades away. But even though some of our readers might feel the sting of losing a source of pirated content, you have to admit it’s hilarious that it was brought down in the end by an innocent, legitimate purchase.

via Engadget