Hungary: ‘We’ll DDoS pirates’
September 20, 2022
The Hungarian telecoms association has mooted a plan to tackle IPTV piracy with denial-of-service attacks. They are seeking permission from the authorities but some fear that exemption from the law might establish a difficult legal precedent.
Pirates use domains, IP addresses, websites, servers and cloud services like other platforms. They know rights owners will attempt domain seizures and other take downs. But legal measures take time and only slow them down. A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack would be outside the current law, so the Hungarian Communications Association (MKSZ) wants the boundaries of the law to be stretched especially for its telecoms industry members, reports Mobile Europe.
But once the principle that you can DDoS ‘for good’, there are fears authorities and institutions could abuse the power. MKSZ says there’s at least 100 illegal distributors in operation, who are unaffected by the ‘slow and ineffective’ measures used by the authorities.
If sanctioned, MKSZ believes such attacks could degrade the quality of an illegal distributor’s service and ruin the viewing experience for subscribers. The plan is to keep up the pressure so that any mitigation methods are overcome. If the illegal service provider detects a DDoS attack and changes their IP address in order to continue the illegal signal distribution, this involves a significant time delay. In order to re-inforce the measures, the process could be used continuously with IP address tracking, the proposal explains.