According to Digital Music News, MediaDefender an anti-piracy company has used an illegal means to try an shutdown what is a legitimate online media selling service Revision3.  Revision3 legally uses bit torrent technologies and as a result of a security hole had servers tricked into acting as a tracker for some illegal content, setup up by MediaDefender by exploiting a security hole according to Revision3.  When Revision3 spotted the abuse and shutout MediaDefender it appears to have triggered a denial of service attack (achieved by saturating a web server with too many requests for content).  So Revision3’s actions which were correctly taken to prevent their servers from being exploited and used for illegal copying (also the the job of MediaDefender) resulted in the service attack. Reviosn3 has a good description of what the DOS attack is like.

Given MediaDefender’s failure to atleast talk with Revision3 let alone use correct legal channels, has been referred the matter to the FBI as it breaks 12 different statutes including Computer Fraud and Misuse act.  Revision3’s news article on the whole event is fascinating insight into how blasé MediaDefender about its actions.  Since the attack, MediaDefender have said they’ve updated their policies to first check to see if the server they’re looking at is associated to a legitimate business. Hey, shouldn’t you have been doing that anyway?  As Revision3 had said, what if someone had exploited an loophole in security for an emergency service to host a bit torrent tracker which had then been attacked by MediaDefender?

Interestingly most of the information describing what has gone on has come from Revision3, and MediaDefender’s website is particularly quiet on these events.