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Think Sci-Hub is Just Downloading PDFs? Think Again

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C C Offline
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018...ink-again/

EXCERPT: I recall thinking that the issue of international IP theft was hitting closer to home for universities, and hoping more of them would start taking the threats posed by Sci-Hub – a similarly “brazen scheme to gather and redistribute scholarly content” – more seriously. So when I was offered an opportunity to present actual evidence of how Sci-Hub is doing so much more than enabling the download of publisher’s PDFs at the SSP Annual Meeting, I accepted.

Why me? I’ve been working on IP intrusions for many years, limiting the damage caused by intrusions to publishers and libraries. In recent years that’s meant spending a lot of time looking at Sci-Hub. I continue to work with legal authorities in the US and UK, as well as with publishers, individual libraries and consortia. Our aim is to make all of these stakeholders aware of the threats, to expose cybercrime, and to share information across the academic research community to help protect publishers, authors, researchers, and library patrons.

Let me be clear: Sci-Hub is not just stealing PDFs. They’re phishing, they’re spamming, they’re hacking, they’re password-cracking, and basically doing anything to find personal credentials to get into academic institutions. While illegal access to published content is the most obvious target, this is just the tip of an iceberg concealing underlying efforts to steal multiple streams of personal and research data from the world’s academic institutions. As my SSP co-panellist Joe DeMarco, IP theft and cybercrime lawyer and former federal cybercrime prosecutor in New York, said during our panel:

I will tell you that in 21 years now of doing work both in the public sector and the private sector, I have never once met a cybercriminal who set out to gain access to a database for one purpose and only confined themselves to that one purpose once they got inside the database. It’s not how criminals think. The criminal doesn’t break into your home just to steal your silver; they break in to steal the silver, the jewels, the electronics, the cash, and anything else worth stealing.


How are they doing this? Stolen individual credentials are published on websites. So far, we know of 29 sites that openly boast about having passwords to access library content. We’ve monitored these and asked libraries to take corrective action. What can they do with passwords? We tested this ourselves. For one user of a library in Michigan, whose credentials were published on an Iranian website, we were not only able to access content through her account but also her profile and her personal information. We were able to track her library usage, including titles requested and when they were available for collection. In the hands of a criminal, this information could be dangerous....

MORE: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018...ink-again/

RELATED: https://www.scivillage.com/thread-6170-p...l#pid23484
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