A Russian startup called "Pirate Pay" has received seed funding from Microsoft. The company's technology is designed to attack BitTorrent swarms and trick clients into disconnecting. They've already been hired by Disney and Sony Pictures to attack downloaders, apparently successfully. The company won't disclose how their technology works, which is usually a sign that it will be trivial to counter — real security measures still work if the other side knows their mechanics. From TorrentFreak:
The idea started three years ago when the developers were building a traffic management solution for Internet providers. The technology worked well. It was able to stop BitTorrent traffic if needed, which made the developers realize that they might have built the holy anti-piracy grail.
“After creating the prototype, we realized we could more generally prevent files from being downloaded, which meant that the program had great promise in combating the spread of pirated content,” Pirate Pay CEO Andrei Klimenko says.
With this new business model in mind the company continued to develop their product, and it didn’t take long before an investor was willing to support it. Last year Pirate Pay received a $100,000 investment from the Microsoft Seed Financing Fund.
