Video site Revision3 suffered a crippling denial of service attack over the Memorial Day weekend, an attack MediaDefender not only admitted to Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback.
An FBI investigation is ongoing into MediaDefender’s role in disrupting Revision3’s service, according to Louderback. He posted about the discovery of the company behind the flood of disruptive traffic, and his chat with MediaDefender’s executives about their firm’s outrageous conduct:
First, they willingly admitted to abusing Revision3’s network, over a period of months, by injecting a broad array of torrents into our tracking server. They were able to do this because we configured the server to track hashes only – to improve performance and stability. That, in turn, opened up a back door which allowed their networking experts to exploit its capabilities for their own personal profit.
Second, and here’s where the chain of events come into focus, although not the motive. We’d noticed some unauthorized use of our tracking server, and took steps to de-authorize torrents pointing to non-Revision3 files. That, as it turns out, was exactly the wrong thing to do. MediaDefender’s servers, at that point, initiated a flood of SYN packets attempting to reconnect to the files stored on our server. And that torrential cascade of “Hiâ€s brought down our network.
Grodsky 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.
Louderback pointed out how a dozen federal statutes cover the activity engaged in by MediaDefender. “Revision3 suffered measurable harm to its business due to that flood of packets,” he said. “Thus we were unable to serve videos and advertising through much of the weekend, and into Tuesday – and even our internal email servers were brought down.”
Words simply fail us to describe MediaDefender’s cracking activity as described by Louderback. Instead, we’ll look forward to seeing a statement from the US Attorney General’s office, hopefully with the words “arrests” and “arraignments” prominently displayed.
