Copyright cop MediaDefender got itself into hot water over the Memorial Day weekend for admittedly (albeit unintentionally it claims) carrying out a denial-of-service attack that shut down Revision3 servers. Revision3 is a San Francisco based Internet video company that produces and distributes such popular shows as Diggnation, The Totally Rad Show, and Internet Superstar.
Prior to this attack, there wasn't a lot of reason to suggest Revision3 and MediaDefender to have a lot in common, never mind a beef with each other. After all Revision3 is Web video production company and MediaDefender is a company that tries to protect owners of copyrighted materials from having their content stolen.
But the two knocked heads this past weekend when MediaDefender was caught red handed exploiting Revision3's BitTorrent tracker for its own use. The incident came to light on Thursday when Revision 3 CEO Jim Louderback posted a very lucid account of how the attack happened and asked MediaDefender to back down.
How and Why it Happened
As PC World has profiled in the past, MediaDefender doesn't always play nice when trying to protect copyrighted material for its clients. It's no secret MediaDefender can be downright nasty and some say deceitful when it comes to its tactics. That's where the mess between MediaDefender and Revision3 starts.
Revision3 uses the BitTorrent peer-to-peer model to distribute its video files, which are often HD-quality and larger in size. This saves money on its end and is a convenient method for distribution. The way BitTorrent works is you start with one person having the file for distribution. To share that file on the BitTorrent network you have to create a torrent file. The torrent file contains instructions that other computers use to seek out and download the file from many other computers that also host the file. The distribution system relies heavily on a tracker server to help seed the file to potentially millions of PCs. Think of the tracker like a flea market with vendors (peers) all swapping goods (files).
Media Defender or Media Offender?
Here is where things get nasty. As part of its normal practices, MediaDefender uses a tactic called decoying, which consists of making fake torrent files of copyrighted material to dissuade people from trying to illegally download those files. A want-to-be downloader who got a hold of a spoof torrent file would end up downloading nothing.
To try and trick downloaders MediaoDefender reportedly exploited a back-door in Revision3's tracker system and figured out a way of distribute decoy tracking files. MediaDefender was in Revision3's flea market, in a sense, shilling its fake tracker files to unsuspecting random file sharers across the Internet to protect copyrighted material.
Revision3 discovered unauthorized files in its flea market and disabled that from happening. MediaDefender then launched a denial-of-service attack on the Revision3 servers. The attack sent upwards of 8000 SYN packets per second. A SYN packet is a tiny blip of information. They're small and insignificant by themselves, but when together in packs, they can be a deadly force. This is what shut down the Revision3 servers and cost its employees hours upon hours of time over the weekend.
That's when Louderback contacted representatives from both MediaDefender and parent company, ArtistDirect. Louderback cited information showing the severity of the attack, which MediaDefender admitted to, but admitted to a less severe automatic-response attack. Point being: the denial-of-service attack was not intentional.
The fact of the matter remains that MediaDefender's tactics to bust copyright infringers are very shady, and the tactics have now cost many employees of a completely innocent company lots of time and hours trying to fix a problem that shouldn't have existed.
Louderback went into even more detail about the attack at the Revision3 blog.
