Media Defender Inolved in Revision3’s DoS Attack

We don’t know how many of you are familiar with Revision3, but if you watch Diggnation, The GigaOm Show, or Tekzilla, you should be. It’s an online media company and they create and produce shows for people to watch on-demand. Over the Memorial Day Weekend they experienced a Denial of Service Attack which is usually a deliberate attack by someone who is trying to prevent a site on the Internet from functioning. They are illegal, at least in the United States, and can cause the site that is experiencing one all kinds of problems. When they happen, often times the people causing the attack are in foreign countries. To Revision3’s surprise, after looking into the attack, they traced it back to a neighbor in their home state of California. In a posting on the Revision3 blog, their CEO Jim Louderback wrote a great explanation of what happened, what they’re doing about it, and who did it.

So what neighbor in their great state is at fault for the attack? Media Defender. Yes, it’s that Media Defender, the one the MPAA hired to help them stop piracy by setting up a fake video site. They call themselves the “leading provider of anti-piracy solutions in the emerging Internet-Piracy Prevention industry” yet what business do they have attacking Revision3 who does absolutely nothing illegal? Louderback explained saying that the company apparently took offense to the fact that they use Bittorent (perfectly legal) to distribute their shows. He says, “We use the internet and peer-to-peer networks to accelerate the spread of legally traded materials that we own. That’s sort of directly opposite to what Media Defender is supposed to be doing.”

We won’t get into the details because there are many of them (which you can read here), but we are disgusted with the method Media Defender used to try and take Revision3 down for no apparent good reason. Louderback says that their logs showed Media Defender sending SYN packets, “upwards of 8,000 packets a second” which brought down their public facing site, their RSS server, and their internal corporate email, or in other words, “the entire Revision3 business.” In the process of all of this, they learned Media Defender had been abusing a Revision3 server without their approval, for quite some time.

Thankfully they’ve gotten the FBI involved looking into the situation and hopefully at the end of the day, Media Defender will have to pay for their actions. Louderback wrapped up his very informative post by saying:

We’re simply in the business of delivering entertainment and information – that’s not life or death stuff. But what if MediaDefender discovers a tracker inside a hospital, fire department or 911 center? If it happened to us, it could happen to them too. In my opinion, Media Defender practices risky business, and needs to overhaul how it operates. Because in this country, as far as I know, we’re still innocent until proven guilty – not drawn, quartered and executed simply because someone thinks you’re an outlaw.