The Story of ElliotSec: Part 2.0
Okay. So you realize you want to take action against a website that has a pirated version of your application or other content. How can you do it? In a simple way, you can start by creating a table in Google Docs or some other office program—that part is not a problem. After this, you just go to Google and search for your application using keywords like "mod," "premium," "unlocked," and others. You will find quite a few sites. Don't be scared if you see around three pages or more of this; it is completely normal.
In reality, there are usually only about three pages of results, which is not that much. If you don't have a super popular application, you can win against around 80% of these websites, and they will remove your content. That's fine. But then you run into the next problem: how are you going to check for new versions of your application when they appear on the internet? That is the real challenge. You can collect all the initial results in your document or your table, but how will you keep it updated? And that is the problem. So...
Cheap weapons
Generally speaking, we have two solutions here. Let's look at the unique one that I really like: Google allows you to use RSS feeds. You can create a feed specifically for certain keywords related to your application, and you'll get updates delivered straight to your favorite RSS reader. If you don't use one yet, I highly recommend getting it. It's fantastic because you only get the exact news and alerts you actually care about. I won't go into detail about specific RSS readers here, but they are incredibly useful for this exact situation.
You can get updates using RSS, but if you don't like that and prefer email instead, you can easily get them delivered straight to your inbox. So, I definitely think it's worth a try. Below, you can see the link to set it up. Just give it a shot! It’s not that difficult to configure properly, it can save you tons of time, and it makes the entire takedown process much more automated.
Google Alerts is not the only solution; there are many others. Of course, we could build a bot or write a small script to crawl Google and gather all the links related to our application. We could even crawl through a bunch of pirate websites directly in search of pirated versions of our apps. But that approach is much more complicated, and it doesn't work as easily as Google's RSS feeds. I will tell you in my next post how you can build something like this in a very simple way.
This approach is what will actually work, and it will be more than sufficient for the beginning of your war against the pirated copies of your application.
Moreover, I want to emphasize that both of these approaches will cost you absolutely nothing. You don't need to buy a subscription, and you don't have to pay for any third-party services—you can protect yourself entirely for free. Of course, it will cost you some time, your computer’s computing power, and the effort required to set everything up and submit your takedown notices. But if you have a smaller application and you run into this issue, it is a fantastic place to start.
To be continued...
