Symantec examines pirate activity in the underground economy

Security firm Symantec has released a study on the underground economy. Part of this study is devoted to piracy.  The Symantec Report on the Underground Economy examines activity on underground economy servers observed by Symantec between July 1st, 2007 and June 30th, 2008. It includes analysis and discussion of the goods and services advertised, advertisers participating in the economy, the servers and channels that host the trading, and a snapshot of piracy activity observed.

Over the course of three months Symantec observed one public domain p2p protocol . In total, the approximate U.S. retail value of all uploads observed by Symantec was $83.4 million. Multimedia software accounted for two-thirds of the $83.4 million total, though the volume of file instances for multimedia software was only 11 percent, this is far more than all of the other categories combined and is likely due to the high prices of multimedia software. By volume of downloads, games were by far the most pirated software.

The study can be downloaded from the Symantec website, and is also available in our knowledge database.