

Inside the Attack that Crippled Revision3 - kyro
http://revision3.com/blog/2008/05/29/inside-the-attack-that-crippled-revision3

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sdurkin
DoS attacks are illegal. If this were some kid in his basement, the FBI would
have long since busted down his door and hauled him off to juvie.

What's with the double standard?

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axod
It's more complex than that. I don't know the details of this instance (Link
is down), but the bittorrent protocol is pretty bad - you can just add any IPs
you wish into a swarm and say they are sharing particular files. So launching
DDOS attacks is pretty simple. There is also no easy way to trace back who
injected those IP addresses into the system.

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pmjordan
Nice. Have infrastructure that can launch SYN floods without a human
triggering it, and then don't have any data centre staff on call during the
weekend. I hope they get into deep trouble for this.

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harry
Ditto, I've been following the media defender debacle since September of last
year (when the e-mails were leaked) and it's never ceased to sicken me. Altho
their business model of 'fighting fire with fire' is the only way I can think
of to properly combat many of the existing issues it's still shady to profit
off of blatantly illegal activities.

At least what tpb provides is legal in Sweden.

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krschultz
He makes the point that what if this happened to a hospital or other critical
server. While that point is valid, they seem to only be going after Bittorrent
ports, so you would think no important servers would accidently be targeted.
However, many colleges nationwide are BT trackers for Linux and other open
source projects. How embarrassing would it be if MediaSentry illegally took
down one of the colleges it said was not enforcing the law.

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axod
Posting info about what I assume is a DOS attack, on the domain being
attacked, seems a little silly. (Link isn't loading for me).

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andyn
It's on the front page of slashdot now.

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axod
Ah thanks for that.

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flipbrad
disgraceful, pitiful even. at a time when content publishers should be
competing on quality or service, and building strong, happy brands, instead
they risk everything employing black hat companies to destroy everything that
disagrees with their existing business model. I synpathise with labels whose
content is being stolen, honestly, I do - but nothing good can come of the
private sector using destructive activity to try and protect its position

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petercooper
This page half loads then Firefox (3 beta) switches to its typical error page,
but saying "The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an
invalid or unsupported form of compression." Anyone else seeing that?

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rms
It's interesting that there is a market for illegal hackers and only the Media
companies seem to be hiring them.

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eru
Or the other actors manage to hire competent crackers and do not get caught.

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tptacek
What's Revision3?

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reggplant
They want to be the Internet's TV providing a wide range of podcasts that
appeal to the tech community.

