technical question on how they track illegal torrent downloader

I have a neighbor that was getting notices about illegal down loading of torrents.

The problem is she is not downloading torrents.
I fix her computer and she does not even have the hard drive space to store the torrents they claim she is downloading. Its a old laptop.

Is there a way some one is spoofing her mac address or any other way that someone can make it look like her computer is doing the downloads
This is Mediacom cable she is using.

First two thoughts for me are that somebody is piggy-backing if she has a WiFi network set up or she's got malware on her system.

No wifi.
And she runs the same security system i do and nothing has ever got through and worked.

If it's not piggybacking, I'm not sure how it could be happening, but tell her to install and run PeerBlock. That might at least keep "them" from finding out about the downloading. Good luck, hope ya get the problem fixed.


TheAssoc.

I should have thought to ask this sooner...

Any kids or teens in the house who could be downloading without her knowledge? Or even a spouse or other live in relative?

Without WiFi this is the most logical thing.

The other thing that comes to mind is that she could have malware which has her set up as a proxy.



[edit on 8/15/10 by Hefficide]

or the ISP might have their information wrong. Odds are she is getting a DHCP address which -could- be renewed periodically and perhaps the records are not clearly being scrutinized. I would ask the ISP to provide proof that her address was in fact connected with the torrent including timestamps. The blame could fall elsewhere.

brill

by own construction, torrent cannot hide users because of client app must know, who has file, to download it. any ads of private torrents ain't more than net for dummies