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I read this story today and was almost taken aback. After reading through the entire article it seemed too good (or bad) to be true, but apparently MediaDefender, who has been covered here multiple times, has recently been caught doing some very naughty (and downright illegal) things. Revision3 suffered a massive denial of service attack over the Memorial Day weekend, one that was targeted at their Bittorrent tracking service. While the attack was focused on Bittorrent, it ended up depriving Revision3 of effectively all their services – including email.

After some investigations on their part, Revision3 discovered that the culprit was MediaDefender, who had initiated a SYN flood attack on their servers after Revision3 patched up a security hole. The hole was being exploited by MediaDefender to inject bad torrents into their system. What makes the story especially interesting is that Revision3 is not a haven for pirates – they use their torrent system to distribute their own, very much legal, content. So what, exactly, was MediaDefender “Defending” people from?

Good question – MediaDefender claims that it was more or less Revision3's fault for patching the security hole, which made their own “automated systems” go berserk. Intentional or not, a company that is already known for using sleazy tactics to achieve their goals has now been caught doing something that is usually affiliated with scum anyway. It's a great read.