Revision3, the online video studio founded by Kevin Rose and home of the Diggnation video podcast amongst others, suffered a denial of service attack at the end of last week. While that’s pretty common, there was a bit more to it than your normal DOS.
The website’s servers suffered extensive outage over the memorial weekend, and the problem continued until Tuesday when the admins came back to work and solved the issue.
MediaDefender To Blame
After the problem had been rectified Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3 posted a very detailed run-down of the issues surrounding the attack, and MediaDefender came out as the culprit.
MediaDefender, as many of you will be aware, is an organisation which gained notoriety last year after setting up a P2P distribution platform which is actually entrapment for illegal file sharers.
So why did MediaDefender target Revision3, a legitimate company that goes by the book, and isn’t trying to promote the distribution of illegal videos?
Legal Use Of BitTorrent
Revision3 does use BitTorrent, serving up it’s own legal content and that’s where the problem lies. It seems that due to a lazy engineer somewhere along the line, the company has been running an open tracker. This means thousands of files of all kinds have been associated with the tracker for years.
These range from current Hollywood blockbusters, to pornography and more besides, and have been on the tracker for as long as four years. MediaDefender noticed this open tracker in the same way as other Torrent users have done, and started publishing it’s own content on there.
Most of the MediaDefender files were actually corrupted or decoy made available to try and frustrate and put potential pirates off stealing copyrighted material.
Server Response
The DOS attack occurred because Revision3 finally took steps against the torrents and MediaDefender’s servers reacted automatically by flooding the site with thousands of messages.
If MediaDefender wasn’t involved with the anti-piracy movement then this incident probably wouldn’t have gained the amount of publicity it has done over the last week, but as it is, it raises some questions.
Anti-Piracy Measures
Why was a company supposedly as well run as Revision3 lazy or incompetent enough to allow the attack to happen? And what good does MediaDefender actually think it is doing?
What is clear after this is that technical anti-piracy measures are clearly doomed to failure. BitTorrent traffic, which is the technology behind most piracy is also used by honest, law-abiding people and companies, and that is a problem when an organisation such as MediaDefender universally goes after everyone using that method of distribution.
