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Revision3 Servers Brought Down By MediaDefender DoS Attack
Thursday, May 29th, 2008 | Tom Carmony
This is a bit outside our typical topical content here on A+E, but I wanted to highlight it anyway, as it’s a disturbing example of an attack on a legit new media company.
Over the recent Memorial Day weekend, Revision3, a company specializing in producing ad-supported video podcasts (including the immensely popular Diggnation, of which we are big fans), fell victim to a denial of service (DoS) attack that knocked their website, RSS feeds, email and much of their content distribution offline for most of the weekend. These type of malicious attacks are not uncommon, particularly against well-known companies.
What makes the story particularly disturbing is that, according to Revision3′s CEO Jim Louderback, the DoS attack was launched by MediaDefender, an anti-piracy group employed in the past by the RIAA, MPAA and other old media companies. The DoS attack was apparently targeted at Rev3′s BitTorrent servers (BitTorrent is a popular peer-to-peer content distribution protocol, often utilized to disseminate copyrighted material such as music, movies, etc.). Revision3, however, only distributed their own content over the BT protocol, so there was no clear reason why MediaDefender would choose to target them (BTW, such vigilante DoS attacks are illegal).
The story gets murkier as Rev3 has investigated and apparently the FBI is looking into the matter as well. Clearly, Revision3 has done nothing but distribute their own content over a perfectly legitimate content distribution network, so they should in no way have to fear being targeted by such old-media industry “watchdogs”. MediaDefender has clearly overstepped their bounds, targeting a legit small business venture, and one can only hope that they pay a price for that. FBI involvement in the matter is certainly a good first step.
Get the full story direct from Revision3′s CEO Jim Louderback here.