Anti-Piracy Company Launches DoS Attack?

Revision3, an online media company, is claiming that it was the target of a denial of service attack by anti-piracy company MediaDefender, and the FBI is now investigating.

MediaDefender works for big entertainment companies to battle peer-to-peer distribution of media. Revision3 is an online media company that puts out shows like Diggnation. Last weekend Revision3 was the victim of a denial of service attack which it blames on MediaDefender, according to Information Week.

In a blog post, Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback explained how his company traced the culprits, expecting to find amateur hackers:

"But instead of some shadowy underground criminal syndicate, the packets were coming from right in our home state of California," he wrote. "In fact, we traced the vast majority of those packets to a public company called ARTISTdirect. Once we were able to get their Internet provider on the line, they verified that yes, indeed, that Internet address belonged to a subsidiary of ARTISTdirect, called MediaDefender."

Louderback has pointed out that Revision3 uses the BitTorrent protocol for its media, and the BitTorrent protocol has been generally classed as a bad boy among those fight P2P distribution, since many illegal networks use it. He also offered his version of the weekend’s DoS attack, stating that "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."