MediaDefender Supposedly Behind Revision3′s Memorial Day Weekend Server DoS Attack

Yesterday Revision3 went offline and Veronica Belmont, former CNET producer and current Tekzilla program host reported “Holy DDOS attacks, Batman! Rev3 is under fire!” on Twitter.  After investigating the reason behind the outage, Jim Louderback (CEO of Revision3) stated that Revision3′s servers were hit with a Denial of Service attack. See the picture below of the Revision3 server.

A denial of service attack is when a server sends tons of requests and packets at one time to another server thus causing the receiving server to give up.
Revision3 uses torrent files to distribute their content.  Torrents allows multiple users to share bandwidth for download or streaming content.  And in this case, the one server that was hit with the DoS attack was Revision3′s BitTorrent server.  The DoS attack assailant was intentionally aiming to take down Revision3′s BitTorrent server.

When tracing the IP address of the assailant that attacked Revision3 servers, Louderback found out that it belonged to MediaDefender.  MediaDefender’s service is to:
“Stop the spread of illegally traded copyrighted material over the internet and peer-to-peer networks.”

However Revision3 trades legal content.  Revision3 may have been wrongfully accused of setting up BitTorrent servers for illegal purposes.  Sony, Universal, the RIAA, and the MPAA have used MediaDefender in the past to prevent illegal files from being traded.

“[Ben] Grodsky [VP of operations at MediaDefender] admits that his computers sent those SYN packets to Revision3, but claims that their servers were each only trying to contact us every three hours. Our own logs show upwards of 8,000 packets a second,” stated Louderback.

Revision3 streams popular web video programs such as The GigaOM Show and Digg Nation.

Information Source & Picture Credit:
[1] Revision3 Blog: Inside the Attack that Crippled Revision3 by Jim Louderback

 

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