STARLINK - Notice of Claimed Infringement

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An email from Starlink informs you with the Notice of Claimed Infringementthat a copyright infringement has taken place via your own IP address through a torrent download.

Fake?

At first, if you have not taken such action, you think the e-mail must be fake and you refrain from clicking on the attached link with the message. After all, you are cautious.

However, if you log into your STARLINK account and go to Support, you will - indeed - see that message. An attachment provides information in XML about the IP, date, time, software used for the download and the downloaded file.

Now you are stunned and puzzled as to who could have hacked into your WLAN.

Clarification

An email to the support team finally reveals the cause of the problem: STARLINK uses CGNAT (Carrier-Grade Network Address Translation).
CGNAT makes ONE IP address available to SEVERAL participants on the Internet. So if there is ONE black sheep among them, ALL participants under this one IP address will be accused.

But not only STARLINK uses CGNAT, other service providers are also forced to use CGNAT due to the limited address space.

However, this also means that such "Notices of Claimed Infringement" are of dubious legal weight solely on the basis of proof that "someone" committed a criminal offense from "his" IP address at the specified time ...

Why CGNAT?

The reason for the decision to use CGNAT is the fact that the address space of IPv4, introduced in 1981, with 4.3 billion unique IP addresses, is now more than reaching its limits, which is why IPv6, which provides 340 sextillion(!) IP addresses, has been used for some time now. However, not every provider has already implemented IPv6, as the entire technology must be converted to so-called dual-stack technology in order to be able to operate IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel. IPv4 uses a 32-bit address range, whereas IPv6 uses 128 bits. Pv6 also no longer requires a DHCP server.

The fact that the IP address changes from time to time is not really comforting, because a number of copyright infringements can be committed during this period ...

Solution approach

So what can users do to protect themselves from the actions of black sheep and their possible criminal consequences in connection with CGNAT?

WLAN password

The ever-valid advice that passwords should not be easy to remember, but as complex as possible, is very important.

However, not every router or access point allows the full character set to be used, including special characters. The only option is to use the maximum possible number of characters of 63. Some manufacturers also reduce the possible maximum number of characters to less than the number of characters specified in the implementation of the WPA2 standard (WiFi Protected Access), based on the outdated AES standard (Advanced Encryption Standard), which in turn is based on the WEP standard (Wired Equivalency Privacy) to IEEE 802.11 defined number of characters.

This means that the maximum number of characters should be exhausted and, if no special characters are permitted, an alphanumeric password should be used, if possible using umlauts and upper and lower case letters.

MAC address filter

Another, far more secure method of protecting yourself against unauthorized WLAN users is MAC address filtering (48-bit address that is uniquely and unchangeably assigned to each network device) in the router's WLAN settings.

The MAC filter settings are usually hidden in the WLAN settings of the router or access point, often under the advanced settings.

If the function is activated, the MAC addresses can either be activated from a list of all previously connected MAC addresses or entered and accepted manually.

From now on, only devices with registered MAC addresses will have access to the Wi-Fi. This ensures that no external device can access the Internet via its own IP address, even if the Wi-Fi password has been hacked.