Quick, I gotta bring you whippersnaps up to speed on this issue with a quick glossary of germs... terms? Yeah I mean terms, cuz I know this ain't no tech site, most of you readers are just music lovers, which is awesome, so I don't expect you know all this shiaaat.
So, a DoS attack stands for Denial of Service, and if you toss an extra ‘d’ on the front (DDoS), it becomes a Distributed Denial of Service, which is a form of hackery. In regular peep speak, it'd be like trying to trying to start a conversation with a dude, who just says ‘what's up’ again and again. And you're the type of peoples who finishes a conversation to completion. Except this dude isn't alone; he brought along like 20,000 of his friends, who just keep saying ‘what's up’ without finishing the conversation. You're trying to keep on top of all of this, but you eventually buckle over and die.
This shit happens on a regular basis on the interwebs, and it's illegal. So, over the Memorial Day weekend, revision3.com was victim to such an attack. Revision3 is an original content internet video site. Think Comedy Central, not YouTube. Their employees spent the long weekend figuring out the details, and it turns out that the DDoS attack was brought on by a company called MediaDefender.
Backstory! MediaDefender is employed by various media groups (RIAA, MPAA) to infiltrate popular P2P and torrent sites and flood them with corrupted content, in an attempt to make a site's value go down or just to collect information on who's doing the downloading. They target sites that track copyrighted information, in hopes of pushing people back to more lucrative forms of media acquiary (*snicker*). MediaDefender is rumored to be the company behind Oink's demise, so it's cool to hate them.
Only problem is, revision3 is legit. They do host a BitTorent tracker, but only to serve up their own (legal) content. When the CEO of revision3 contacted MediaDefender about this incident, they actually bowned up to it. MediaDefender said they were injecting fake torrents into the site through a security hole, which revision3 closed last week. Apparently MediaDefender is set up to hammer the shit out of a server if such a hole is closed, which would explain the DDoS attack. MediaDefender claims they were only sending one connection attempt every three hours, but Revision3's server logs were showing 8,000 packets a second. That's 8,000 dudes saying ‘what's up’ per second trying to initiate a conversation. That's ridiculous.
So, want to read the awesome part? Revision3 has involved the FBI. MediaDefenders actions are illegal in various ways, and the PirateBay sued the companies making use of MediaDefender's services for exactly the same thing last year. When the big media companies are continually pointing the finger at consumers for fraudulent activity, it's just deserts when they get called out for being hypocritical assholes. Delicious.
We'll keep the details coming as they emerge.
