DOS attack against Revision3’s services traced to MediaDefender

Revision3, an online media company, has alleged that an outage experienced over Memorial Day weekend was traced to a Denial of Service (DOS) attack initiated by servers owned by anti-piracy group MediaDefender. In a detailed blog, Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback detailed their network sleuthing, which traced the offending DOS network packets back to MediaDefender. The shocker was when both the CEO and the Vice President of Operations at MediaDefender admitted that they have been injecting a broad array of torrents--without authorization--into Revision3's BitTorrent tracking server.

This all was made possible by a misconfiguration at Revision3. Revision3 unwittingly closed the backdoor just prior to the weekend which, Louderback hypothesized, caused MediaDefender's servers to throw "an epic tantrum", slinging upward of 8,000 SYN packets a second at Revision3. Revision3 uses BitTorrent to host its own legal content. The FBI are looking into the matter now, but it will be interesting to see how it all turns out.

For more about the alleged DOS attack:
- check out this InformationWeek article