Legitimate internet TV network hit by denial of service attack from anti-piracy company
June 1, 2008
Online media company Revision3 suffered a severe Denial of Service (DoS) attack last weekend, which brought down the everything from the main site to the RSS server, and even its internal corporate email. Although DoS attacks far from uncommon in the modern internet era, the question on everyone’s mind (after hours of solving the problem, natch) was this: who would want to bring down Revision3?
After some digging, Revision3’s engineers found the answer. It attacked by a subsidiary of public company, Artistdirect, called MediaDefender. MediaDefender’s purpose in life is to “stop the spread of illegally traded copyrighted material over the internet and peer-to-peer networks.”
Which of course begs the question why it had pointed its beady eyes at Revision3 - a perfectly legitimate internet TV network. One that LEGALLY trades in its own copyrighted material over the internet, including popular shows such as Diggnation. Not exactly the Pirate Bay, really.
For a full account of what transpired that fateful weekend, it is well worth checking Revision3’s lengthy blog post about it. Here’s the skinny though: MediaDefender became interested in Revision3 because of its use of BitTorrent technology. BitTorrent is of course, often used for internet piracy (but by no means exclusively). Revision3, like an increasing number of other companies, uses it to distribute its larger files legally and cheaply.
MediaDefender apparently wasn’t interested in that and found a back door into Revision3’s network, “allowing their networking experts to exploit its capabilities for their own personal profit.” Revision3 engineers spotted the unauthorised use of its tracking server and locked them out, which in turn initiated a flood of SYN packets attempting to reconnect to the files. And then everything went arse over tit.
Mediadefender - which has had clients including Sony and Universal Music and works by targeting peer-to-peer networks, propagating fake files and launching denial of service attacks against distributors - has since tried to explain its actions.
"Our systems were targeting a tracker not even knowing it was Revision3’s tracker," Randy Saaf, Media Defender’s CEO, said in a recent interview. "They were using the tracker as the tracker for their legitimate content. It had been open for years."
And so MediaDefender’s actions are exposed as a classic example of why any kind of vigilantism is very bad idea. Sure enough, an innocent organisation trying to perform legitimate business got caught in the crossfire. This time it was ‘just’ an intenret TV site; but the question is really, what if it was something like a hospital or an airport that was targeted?
Whether MediaDefender’s actions were unlawful is now being assessed. The FBI is investigating.
Written by Ilinx · Filed Under Internet
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