THE WAREZ UNDERGROUND

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When people pirate software such as games, operating systems, utilities, and applications, they call those pirated copies warez. While organizations such as the Business Software Alliance (the BSA, at http://www.bsa.org) claim that software piracy causes publishers to lose $13 billion in revenue every year, that figure can be impossible to verify.

For instance, many people pirate software for nothing more than the thrill of finding the latest copy of a popular program so they can earn bragging rights among their friends; they may never even use the program. Others enjoy toying with pirated programs but never use them for an extended period of time. Despite the fact that some programs are copied and pirated by thousands of people, not everyone who pirates software does so to avoid buying it.

In some countries, certain programs are simply unavailable or are so outrageously expensive that few people can afford to buy a legitimate copy. In those cases, people may pirate programs to get access to software they wouldn’t normally be able to afford or can’t obtain legally.

Some people argue that piracy may actually help software publishers in the long run. College students, with their limited budgets, often pirate software to save their money for buying more important items (like beer). Yet once students get familiar with a particular program, they may end up purchasing a legitimate copy of a later version simply because they’ve grown accustomed to the pirated program. Eliminate the pirated copy, and these same students might eventually purchase a different program altogether.

HOW WAREZ TRADING WORKS

Anyone can trade warez, and many, many people do every day, without much forethought. Ever ask a friend or coworker to make a copy of a program for you? However, while this small-scale trading is illegal, it isn’t nearly as disturbing to the software industry as the large-scale, organized warez trading that occurs among amateurs and professionals.

Many hackers organize themselves into warez trading groups and simply pirate software for the fun of it. To them, pirating software is a game where the object is to be the first to offer a popular commercial program. Of course, offering a pirated copy of Curious George Learns Phonics isn’t nearly as impressive as being the first warez group to offer a full working copy of the latest version of Microsoft Windows or Office, which is why children’s software turns out to be hard to find on the file sharing networks. It’s the cool factor at work.

If a warez group can offer pirated software on the same day as the official release (known as 0-day warez), their status shoots up considerably. And if they can offer a pirated copy before the official release date (known as negative-day warez or pre-release warez), their status skyrockets exponentially.

To get a copy of a major program before it’s released, warez groups rely on someone who either works for the company developing the program, or who is involved in the shipping, duplicating, or packaging of a program. Corporate insiders can slip out a copy of the program and pass it along to a warez group simply for the thrill of doing so.

Once a warez group gets their hands on a program, they enlist the help of a cracker, who specializes in removing any copy protection embedded in the software. Crackers use disassembler programs such as IDA Pro (http://www.datarescue.com ) or hex editors such as Hex Workshop (http://www.bpsoft.com) to disable any product-activation features (used in programs such as Windows XP), to strip away any copy-protection mechanisms, or to insert the warez group’s name in the program’s splash screen as a mark that they were the ones responsible for cracking that particular program.

Once the program has either been stripped of any copy-protection schemes or branded with the warez group’s name and logo, the warez group contacts others by email, instant messaging, or chat rooms to trade for warez cracked by other warez groups. Eventually every warez group winds up with the latest copies of almost every commercial program available.

Most warez groups post their warez on web or FTP sites for anyone to download (see Figure 12-1). Warez FTP sites are often accessible by invitation only to members who get access by first uploading a pirated program that the FTP site administrator doesn’t have; this ensures that the site will continue to grow.

Figure 12-1: Many warez websites list an incredible variety of commercial software available for downloading.

Setting up a warez FTP site can be risky, because the site can be easily traced back to its physical location. To avoid this problem, some warez traders find space on another computer at work, at a university, or on a hacked computer anywhere in the world, and they secretly set up an FTP site on that computer stocked full of warez. (It’s not illegal to link to pirated programs, but it is illegal to store those pirated files on your own site.) The warez trader can then publicize the existence of this secret FTP site, often called a drop site, so others can access the pirated programs. Such drop sites can run for days or longer until the system administrator notices that something is gobbling up both disk space and bandwidth. Of course, should the authorities eventually trace the location of this latest warez FTP site, they’ll only find an innocent and likely puzzled system administrator instead of the real warez pirate.

To protect themselves, warez groups may also provide links to warez files stored on free web hosting sites created on GeoCities (http://geocities.yahoo.com) or FortuneCity (http://www.fortunecity.com). Such free web hosting services allow anyone to create a website anonymously, thereby protecting the warez group. If you ever find a warez website and can’t seem to download a copy of a pirated program because the links are broken, you can pretty well guess that the free web hosting sites containing the illegally copied programs were shut down.

Chat rooms and newsgroups are another rich source for warez trading. Warez trading newsgroups, such as alt.binaries.cd.image, alt.binaries.mac, alt.binaries.mac.cd.images, alt.cracks, alt.binaries.cd.image.games, and alt.binaries.games are usually flooded with pirated software, web or FTP sites where a particular pirated program can be found, or serial numbers to activate pirated programs. Wade through the mostly meaningless responses, and you’ll eventually find a message that contains a pirated program or a list of serial numbers needed to run that program (see Figure 12-2).

Figure 12-2: Through newsgroups, you can find plenty of warez and serial numbers needed to run pirated programs.

Because anything posted over the Internet can be traced, some warez traders avoid the Internet altogether and rely on direct dial-up electronic bulletin board systems (abbreviated as BBSs). A BBS is simply an ordinary computer accessible through a phone line. To access a warez BBS, you must know both the phone number to call and the correct password to get in. While warez BBSs can be nearly impossible for authorities to find, once the phone number is discovered (usually through spying on warez chat rooms and newsgroups), the person who owns that number is a sitting duck.

TRADING WAREZ FOR PROFIT

While many warez groups trade simply for the fun and challenge, some use pirated software to lure people to their websites for financial gain. Once people visit their sites, they may suddenly find themselves bombarded by porn pop-up ads that sprout faster than you can shut them down. The porn companies pay websites each time their ad pops up in somebody’s browser, so warez groups earn extra money every time they lure another unsuspecting person into a barrage of pop-ups that won’t go away (and also never seem to give access to the warez files in the first place).

PROFESSIONAL WAREZ PIRACY

Although warez groups provide stolen copies of programs to others, they rarely profit directly from their activities. The bigger problem for software publishers comes from professionals who specialize in mass producing counterfeit CDs (including music, video, and software).

For less than a few thousand dollars, these professionals can purchase CD and DVD duplicating machines to mass-produce copies of popular programs such as Norton Utilities or Macromedia Flash. Toss in a few scanned images of program logos wrapped in a CD case, and many counterfeit programs can look like legitimate copies, and they can be sold through flea markets, swap meets, eBay, or to unsuspecting (or equally guilty) domestic and overseas merchants.

Professional pirates rarely rely on warez trading, because the quality can be doubtful and availability unreliable. Instead, most buy one legitimate copy of the program and then make thousands of copies of it. The profits they make from selling illegal copies more than cover the cost of buying the legitimate copy of the program and their duplicating equipment.

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