During season 8 of Game of Thrones, Group-IB team take down over 43,700 download links of Game of Thrones in Russia. In this season 8 of GOT spread far and wide, spanning 1098 different websites and more than 90 of those sites specially designed to spread pirate copies.
According to the Group-IB team, they took down more than 30,000 links and removed from search engine too.
Group-IB says, “In response to the blocking, online pirates struck back by creating mirrors on a daily basis – copies of their websites with new but very similar domain names. For instance, one of the pirates created more than 20 mirrors on their subdomains,”
And Group-IB team says and according to the pirate forum post “owner of the pirate websites were not ready for the attack on them. And some pages disappeared… some of them do not appear in search results’,”
“For us, the battle against online pirates, trying to profit off the illegal distribution of the Game of Thrones in Russian, was as fierce as for George R.R. Martin’s characters,” Busargin says.
“I would also like to highlight Amediateka’s commitment to counter online piracy in Russia: they brought in Group-IB Anti-Piracy team ahead of time and have been making continuous efforts to popularize legal viewership of the Game of Thrones making it available on its website, in movie theaters all over the country and even on the stadium.”
While there will always be historic GoT links to clean up, Group-IB also protects other titles, including True Detective, Billions, The Good Wife, and Westworld. Game of Thrones may be over, but the takedown work will persist for years to come.