You guys watch Revision 3, right? Diggnation, Tekzilla (my personal favorite), Totally Rad, etc. The company was DoS’d last week, and you’ll never guess who was responsible.
Can you say MediaDefender, the same company the RIAA and MPAA employs to shut down illegal BitTorrent trackers? According to Rev3’s CEO Jim Louderback, the anti-BitTorrent company had been sending more than 8,000 SYN packets a second to Rev3’s servers, leading to the outage. Meanwhile, MediaDefender said it was only sending one packet every three hours. That’s quite a difference.
It gets better! It seems MediaDefender had been up to no good vis-à-vis Rev3 for some time now.
First, they [ArtistDirect’s CEO and a MediaDefender vice president; MediaDefender is a subsidiary of ArtistDirect] willingly admitted to abusing Revision3’s network, over a period of months, by injecting a broad array of torrents into our tracking server. They were able to do this because we configured the server to track hashes only – to improve performance and stability. That, in turn, opened up a back door which allowed their networking experts to exploit its capabilities for their own personal profit.
Louderback goes on:
Although I can only guess, here’s what I think really happened. Media Defender was abusing one of Revision3’s servers for their own purposes – quite without our approval. When we closed off their backdoor access, MediaDefender’s servers freaked out, and went into attack mode – much like how a petulant toddler will throw an epic tantrum if you take away an ill-gotten Oreo.
This is the part when we all say “boo!” to MediaDefender, and wish Rev3 the best of luck in the future.
Speaking of Diggnation, they’re filming a live episode of the show here in New York next week. It’s in Brooklyn (Stuido B on Banker Street), and I imagine lots of the NYC “tech community” will be there.