Hollywood’s bittorrent hit man seriously wounds Revision3

There’s a little known (before now) thriving business of attacking open Bittorrent servers the reduce MPAA and the RIAA’s “losses”. While I have no way of being certain, it would seem that the one company in question could be operating automated attack and destroy systems that cannot differentiate between illicit and legitimate trackers. The liability should be huge, and the RIAA and MPAA have already accumulated a huge karma debt.

CEO Jim Louderback revealed today that the outage was caused by a massive denial of service attack that he says was perpetrated by MediaDefender, a file-sharing mitigation firm that gets paid by Big Content to disrupt peer-to-peer networks.

A SYN flood aimed at Revision3’s BitTorrent tracker clogged the company’s tubes and brought down all of its web services. The traffic logs indicated that the network was getting slammed by over 8,000 packets every second. Revision3 tracked the source of the packets and discovered that the attack originated from MediaDefender, at which point Louderback confronted the company’s executives. ArtistDirect CEO Dimitri Villard and MediaDefender vice president Ben Grodsky admitted to Louderback that they had been exploiting the lax security configuration of Revision3’s BitTorrent tracker and using it to conduct decoying operations, but they disavowed knowledge of the denial of service attack and claimed that their servers were only pinging Revision3 once every three hours. (Ars Technica)