MediaDefender Attacks Revision3 Servers Mistakenly

 The best justice of all is poetic justice. If you don’t agree with me, check out the recent case of MediaDefender’s DoS attack on Revision3 servers. For the uninformed, MediaDefender is a company that simply exists to harm P2P networks, wherever they exist, typically contracted by groups like the RIAA and MPAA to flood torrent tracking sites with bogus torrents – they believe that by attacking the technology itself, they can stem the tide of pirated music and movies served via BitTorrent and other P2P networks, despite the potential for legitimate applications of P2P and BitTorrent technology, such as Revision3’s.

When Revision3’s servers discovered that they were being flooded with bogus torrents (that is, torrents that didn’t point to Revision3’s own media), they began to remove the torrent listings, prompting the initiation of a DoS attack by MediaDefender’s servers. Of course, in this case MediaDefender didn’t just attack any two-bit torrent-tracking site – they attacked a legitimate business that simply happened to be using BitTorrent technology to serve its customers. Never mind that the tactics MediaDefender used to try to shut Revision3 down were illegal under 18 different federal statutes. It’s our hope that Revision3 will seek to prosecute MediaDefender to the fullest extent allowed by law for this grossly errant and aggressive behavior on their part —  since a basic precept of American justice is that two wrongs don’t make a right. Though I suspect the RIAA and MPAA lobbyists may yet be at work on that one as well…

“We’d noticed some unauthorized use of our tracking server, and took steps to de-authorize torrents pointing to non-Revision3 files. That, as it turns out, was exactly the wrong thing to do. MediaDefender’s servers, at that point, initiated a flood of SYN packets attempting to reconnect to the files stored on our server. And that torrential cascade of ‘Hi’s brought down our network,” said Louderback.