14 DAY TRIAL // While investigating two teenagers for hacking into the computers of numerous celebrities, German authorities have found an entire community dedicated to stealing unreleased material from recording artists.
Back in August, German police arrested 22-year-old Christian M. from Wesel and 17-year-old Deniz A. from Duisburg following an investigation into the leak of unreleased songs online.
Over fifty artists are believed to have been affected, including Lady Gaga, Mariah Carey, Leona Lewis and Justin Timberlake, and there is even evidence of some of them being blackmailed.
According to a report in Der Spiegel, Christian and Deniz were actually part of a much larger community of German hackers competing to see who can steal unreleased songs the most famous singers.
The group counts over 100 members and used to hang out over at rmx4u.com until that domain was seized last year by Homeland Security Investigations for copyright infringement.
They not only target celebrities, but also their managers, family members, friends, the staff at record labels and anyone who might be in the possession of unreleased material.
The stolen songs are shared online with the other hackers for fame and glory, but there is also evidence that Deniz and Christian sold some of them to buyers in Mexico and the United Arab Emirates.
R&B singer Usher is believed to have cancelled the release of an already produced album in 2009, because the songs on it had already leaked onto the Internet.
The hackers are gathering information about the artists and their friends from social networking sites and then target them via socially engineered emails.
They impersonate people and send trojans purporting to be photos or send phishing emails in the name of big companies like Yahoo! or Apple, whose purpose is to steal the passwords to their online accounts.
Deniz and Christian have now been stopped and are facing jail time, but their fellow hackers remain at large and will most likely continue to target the music industry.