Tunisie Tribune (IPTV) – A TorrentFreak article reveals how the police manage to trace – sometimes with disconcerting ease – the pirates behind IPTV sites.The fight by authorities and rights holders against illegal IPTV sites (and more generally against piracy) is a real game of cat and mouse, with sites reopening as soon as platforms close.The effects of this fight thus remain variable for the moment – ​​piracy is still very prevalent in Europe and in the world.But for the holders of the rights of pirated works, fighting pirates in this way is better than doing nothing.Especially since it allows the authorities to develop the tools and skills necessary to go back more easily to the administrators of the sites in question.In recent years, TorrentFreak tells us, the police have converted to open source intelligence, or OSINT.Concretely, it is simply a question of collecting public and / or freely accessible indices on the internet to go back to the administrators of the IPTV sites - even when the latter have taken the necessary precautions so that their name never appears in databases such as WHOIS.One of the easiest ways to collect this data is simply to do some research in Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search engines.Nevertheless, the OSINT methods of the police go, in 2022, much further according to documents taken up by TorrentFreak.A fairly comprehensive list of OSINT tools is available on the OSINT Framework site.But in their investigations the police must often adapt their methods to each target.The grail is to find even a snippet of information, or a set of data allowing fingerprinting and thus identifying a person who has nevertheless taken care of his anonymity online.TorrentFreak explains that the investigations individually target several aspects of this type of illegal business: suppliers, aggregators, developers, resellers... In one example, the site shows how a search on the ZoomEye or Shodan engine, specialized in the Internet of Things, makes it easy to find working pirate IPTV transcoders.These devices are the keystone of illegal services to market these subscriptions.In several cases the police realized that platforms were using the Kylone add-on to manage their fleets of transcoders.Searching for Kylone in ZoomEye or Shodan, more than a hundred results appear.We can then know in which countries the transcoders are located, and it is possible to collect their IP, which can make it possible to discover links with illegal domain names.In some cases, from this stage, the investigators come across an address that may be that of an administrator.TorrentFreak also cites the case of Ulango.TV.First the investigators consulted the WHOIS of the site, allowing them to obtain an IP address and the details of the host.Then, using the Google Sitemap Generator tool, the investigators obtained a list of the sites to which Ulango.TV offered links.This allowed investigators to discover a Twitter account in addition to another piece of the puzzle.They then looked for email addresses associated with Ulango.TV using Hunter.io, a site specializing in OSINT investigations around email addresses.Then they tried to open a fake account on the site.This allowed them to obtain the IBAN code of a bank account linked to the illegal company.The account was associated with a name that had already come up in police searches, which led to a quick arrest and questioning of the owner.TorrentFreak cites other examples of investigations and the tools that allowed authorities to track down pirates.Which ultimately doesn't seem as difficult as you might think, with the tools available to all Internet users in 2022...Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.