Darknet Diaries, Ep 148: Dubsnatch

Full transcript: https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/148/

Topics covered:

• The music file trading scene

• Leaking and how it can delay rollouts or prevent releases altogether

• URL shorteners as an attack vector for finding upcoming releases

• Public links from cloud storage providers as a form of first-class "backdoor" access to record label accounts

• Responsible disclosure after compromising accounts

• Inspecting the project files from a DAW (e.g. Ableton Live, Adobe Audition, Pro Tools) to learn how top artists are creating their music

Notable claims:

• An artist known as Dinodriller (AKA Dion Timmer) is responsible for the Excision Xtrill leak, scavenging his house for unreleased music

  We were sitting there on Skype like, oh, look for this and that and this and that — sending him file names. Like, could you look if there’s this thing and this other thing, and blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, Excision was out at the gym. We’d just be sitting there like, get this, get that. Eventually Dino ran out of old hard drives to comb. So, we were like, well, there’s stuff missing from here that should be there. So, the final location that was searched was Excision’s actual sock drawer for CDs and USB drives.

• Skrillex has been ghost produced for many years

  Skrillex is one of the ones that is ghost written, ghost produced. He’s not real. He’s just a face, a brand.

  Yeah, there’s a team of — in 2019, the team was at least five, six people putting together these songs, and that’s what it’s always been, really. Skrillex’s first release in 2009 and 2010, like Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, his first ep, was ghost produced by Noisia to, well, quite a large extent. Maybe not entirely, but a large portion of his sounds over the years have come from other people putting it all together. So, yeah, this ghost producing runs deep in this scene. So many of the big players are fake.

• A user by the name of Spintire was responsible for many different big leaks, selling off highly rare/value tracks in the song trade

  I wasn’t into that, but I would later find out that Spintire was sort of starting to get into that. I mean, after a while of these things keeping leaking, starting to leak on Reddit that were meant to be just kept between us and that no one else was supposed to have access to, I clocked on that Spintire must have been being dishonest about it. So, I confronted him in mid-October. I said, are you sharing these? Just tell me right now. Are you sharing these? He says, no, it’s not quite like that. I said, well, how is it, then? He says, I can’t say. I say, is someone paying you for them? He says, yeah. So, I think, oh, well, finally I’ve — he’s admitted it and I’ve caught him out on his whole game plan. He goes on to explain that he quit his actual job to sell these files to some rich kid on the other side of the world.

  So, we share a couple of things back and forth with each other like old times. The Purple Lamborghini demo was one of those things. About a week goes by and as usual, it leaks on Reddit. The one single, possible culprit; Spintire.