Manga Scans: Hacking Sites Shut Down in the US Already Have Successors in Russia


Merouan Goumiri

November 01, 2022 at 6:00 p.m.

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panic hack © © Pexels / Cottonbro

© Pexels / Cottonbro

Nowadays, many industries are globally devastated by piracy. If we can first think of that of the video, that of the manga is unfortunately not left out…

Manga piracy sites targeted by a US court have made their (re)appearance on the Russian side.

Manga, an industry consumed by piracy

In recent years, the manga industry has been the victim of a major explosion in piracy. While Japan generally succeeds in enforcing the laws concerning piracy in its own country, it unfortunately encounters great difficulties when it comes to combating foreign threats.

Shueisha, a popular Japanese publishing house in the Land of the Rising Sun, recently filed a lawsuit ex parte (i.e. in the absence of the other party) against different operators in a court in the Northern District of California. The goal is to identify the people behind the sites in question. Among them, we find mangagohan.com, mangapro.top, gokumanga.com, doki1001.com, manga1001.in and comick.top.

Shueisha wasn’t the only publishing house to take legal action against piracy sites over the summer. Indeed, still in the California court, various complaints were filed against the Chinese site MangaBank, whose owner was finally sentenced last August.

A busy summer for publishers

A few weeks ago, several publishers, including Shueisha, Shogakukan, Kadokawa and Kodansha, came together to file a new complaint. The objective of this approach is to succeed in obtaining information that would allow them to take legal action against operators of piracy sites. The publishers also need the court to authorize the disclosure of documents from companies such as Google and Microsoft so that the investigation can continue in the rules of the art.

Anyway, it seems that among all the domains targeted by publishers, several of them use the services of Cloudflare in terms of content distribution. The latter would also have used the services of Visa, Mastercard and PayPal for the financial register. Additionally, a large number of hacking sites appear to be using IP addresses linked to Vietnamese ISPs. Enough to support the idea that the operators do indeed use identical modes of exploitation, and that their authors could in fact be the same people.

Piracy of manga: after the United States, place in Russia

Unfortunately, it is often easy for hacking sites to rename themselves to reappear elsewhere and/or in another form. This is for example what Mangaraw.co recently did, whose number of monthly visits still exceeds 25 million. Now Mangaraw.to, the site is no longer hosted by Cloudflare, but by Fishnet Communications, whose IP address points to the city of Saint Petersburg, Russia.

In view of what we describe, it is clear that the fight against piracy is far from over, as the number of sites that continue to hatch and move around the world is important. And regrettably, the manga industry is no more spared than other sectors. Let’s hope all the same that the Japanese publishers will manage, in their common fight, to put an end to the illegal use of their manga. Even if it will probably take many years, in the best case…

Source : Torrent Freak



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