Over Memorial Day weekend, Revision3’s servers were brought down benenath the weight of a Denial of Service attack. The culprit? None other than MediaDefender, an anti-piracy service that specializes in disrupting P2P traffic.
Apparently, MediaDefender was abusing Revision3’s Bittorrent tracker (which they use to distribute legal copies of their own shows), by “injecting a broad array of torrents into [Revision3’s] tracking server.” When Revision3 deauthorized those torrents, MediaDefender’s servers “initiated a flood of SYN packets attempting to reconnect to the files.” Approximately 8,000 packets per second, by Revision3’s logs. MediaDefender claims that this was not an attack aimed at Revision3, but a natural consequence of losing contact with the torrents they had improperly injected into Revision3’s tracking server.
DoS attacks are illegal, and even if this wasn’t a targeted attack, you would think MediaDefender would still be liable for any financial losses Revision3 suffered as a result of the attack, as well as illicit profits MediaDefender earned through the unauthorized use of their server. However, I am not a lawyer. I’m hoping that Revision3 will take action, because this is really just the tip of the iceberg for MediaDefender, and they need to be brought in line.
