How to Trap Pirates Online

The modern internet is full of digital pirates. Websites that freely share and distribute copyrighted intellectual property without permission are all over the web, and governments around the world seem powerless in their attempts to stop them. Internet piracy is a controversial topic because it offers free access to products for internet users in less fortunate countries but downloading and distributing copyrighted products is still a clear violation of the law.

While the internet is full of controversial opinions on digital pirates, we are not here to judge. In this article, we will discuss how companies and government agencies manipulate digital tools to trap pirates online. We will discuss the functionality of honeypots and how they are used to combat internet piracy. Pirates usually operate behind free proxies – intermediary servers that redirect your data packets and assign to them a different IP address. While it is not recommended to use free proxies because they are set up by unknown third parties, internet users use them to hide their network identity to preserve anonymity or cover up illegal activities. A public proxy is rarely a good idea, but if you only want to test internet privacy tools, use a free proxy list to find free proxy servers supplied by legitimate proxy providers as a part of a free trial. They will help you avoid traps that are usually set up for public proxies to trap pirates online. For now, let’s discuss the methods used to detect cybercriminals sharing copyrighted content.

Trapping users in honeypots

Honeypots are popular cybersecurity systems that identify potential criminals and redirect them to a decoy website. These web pages can contain altered information to mislead web scrapers, or it can be an exact copy of a page that is closely monitored to track rerouted data packets.

Such traps are great security systems for popular retailers and websites that get their fair share of cyberattacks. There can be many criteria that trigger these defence systems. To combat internet piracy, government agencies can seize the ownership of torrent sites and other pages that illegally distribute intellectual property and set up a honeypot to track new visitors.

The internet is full of popular torrent sites that offer free copyrighted content and they are constantly targeted by government agencies. Even when such pages get taken down, they often reemerge to serve their visitors once again, but such reappearance raises questions among internet pirates. While the web page becomes functional, it can become government honeypots that monitor incoming traffic.

How to avoid false identification?

Internet users that care about their privacy mask their connections with proxy servers. While most web surfers just want to strengthen their online anonymity, there is also a fair share of online pirates that use these tools to protect their network identity. However, if you use publicly available free proxies, you can end up using the same IP as a cybercriminal. Well-protected websites can recognize these abused addresses and ban them or redirect them to a honeypot.

These honeypots are used to capture bad guys but often monitor average users that connect through a public proxy. Legitimate proxy servers that come from lawful proxy server providers offer their clients stable proxies but do not allow illegal use of their services. With a good proxy provider on your side, you can preserve your online anonymity and avoid false identification.

Trapping low-level pirates

While the biggest distributors of copyrighted intellectual property use multiple layers of protection to avoid detection, low-level pirates that seek out products for free are usually sloppy and only use public proxies to mask their identity. Because the IPs of these servers often end up in honeypots, web server owners and government agencies can track these addresses and their activity on decoy servers.

Because there are hundreds if not thousands of users that connect to the internet through suspicious free proxies, their addresses exist in databases of many web servers, and their owners can blacklist such IPs or redirect users into honeypots.

More reasons to avoid public proxies

Even if you do not care about misidentification online, free proxies are a poor option for online anonymity. Even if the proxy server is close to your location, the loss of internet speed is far bigger than compared to a legitimate datacenter proxy. To make things worse public proxies are often set up by the pirates that entrap gullible users to steal their private data for profit. The only public proxies you can trust are then ones recommended by lawful proxy providers that offer them as a part of a free trial to help new users start using online security tools. This way you can avoid all the additional risks to your internet privacy, and find the most suitable free proxies on the lists provided by well-respected proxy providers. Understanding how online pirates operate and the methods used to catch them, you can choose the best tools to ensure your anonymity on the web.