Re: RIAA timestamps off

["Scholz, Greg" <gscholz () KEENE EDU>]

I am curious how people are interpreting the "last found" date/time
listed on the RIAA notices? I never read "file sharing occurred at".

It is my general suspicion that they troll the Internet looking for the
advertisement of songs. Maybe they attempt to download them maybe they
don't.

So UserX logs into limewire, song list is made public.  10 hrs later
song list is still public but no one may be actually pulling the data.
Technically it is the making of the infringing material available that
is the "crime" so the user is "seen" and is sought by the RIAA.

So this might account for timestamps off and still be a somewhat
legitimate scenario.

Thoughts?

_________________________
Thank you,
Gregory R. Scholz
Director of Telecommunications
Information Technology Group
Keene State College
(603)358-2070
 
--Lead, follow, or get out of the way. 
(author unknown)
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Sweeny, Jonny [mailto:jsweeny () IU EDU] 
Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 11:50 AM
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
Subject: [SECURITY] RIAA timestamps off

Has anyone else had issues where the RIAA timestamps for DMCA notices
are off?  I don't know how many of you compare them with NetFlow data,
but we've found that when we do, there are often inconsistencies -- the
largest being 41 hours, but more often being 1-10 hours off.  We use
NTP, and are confident about our timestamps, logs and NetFlow data.  The
majority of our recent notices have been for VPN IP addresses (the
turnaround time of that IP space is *very* short) so these errors could
easily lead to misidentification.  We're assuming that the reason
they're sending incorrect timestamps because their detection
system/application is using cached data.  

One recent example for illustration: a connection ends at 16:56 UTC.
Tons of traffic on port 37107 during that session.  The RIAA alleges
(under penalty of perjury) that file sharing occurred at 18:16.  No one
was using that IP address at that time.  NetFlow data confirms that
there was no traffic at 18:16.

Anyone else comparing allegations with NetFlow data?

Anyone else seeing inconsistencies?

Thanks,

--
~Jonny Sweeny, GSEC, GCWN, GCIH, SSP-CNSA
Incident Response Manager, Lead Security Analyst
Office of the VP for Information Technology, Indiana University
PGP key & S/MIME cert: https://itso.iu.edu/Jonny_Sweeny
jsweeny () iu edu  p(812)855-4194  f(812)856-1011