Last week, Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback laid bare a detailed assessment of the makings, the happenings, and the aftereffects of a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack leveraged against the San Francisco-based Web video company by MediaDefender, a subset of Artists Direct, whose mission is to disrupt copyright abuse by unleashing fake BitTorrent files via trackers seen as either knowingly or unknowingly facilitating the transfer of illegally-copied materials, be they in the form of music or movie files. The barrage of SYN packets sent the way of the company’s servers in response to an automated sensing of a disrupted flow of data from MediaDefender’s network of machinery, brought down Revision3’s entire base of operations for much of - if not all - the Memorial Day weekend, which spread across the dates of May 24-26.
The Saturday following Louderback’s portrayal of events and his company’s analysis - which is purportedly being complemented by a supposedly still-active FBI investigation - MediaDefender’s CEO, Randy Saaf, was quoted by David Kravets of Wired’s Threat Level blog, as saying:
"Our systems were targeting a tracker not even knowing it was Revision3's tracker. They were using the tracker as the tracker for their legitimate content. It had been open for years. ... We saw an open BitTorrent tracker with a lot of pirated content on it. We had been posting fake files to their tracker. Over Memorial Day weekend, Revision3 changed some configurations.”
The change(s), as we now understand, induced MediaDefender’s servers to fire some 7-8,000 SYN packets per second at Revision3’s tracker, flooding virtually all of the company’s core Net-connected technological infrastructure.
Forward to about 24 hours post Threat Level’s publication of its brief MediaDefender interview, and we heard earlier today from the Revision3 CEO once again, this time on the live broadcast of the popular TWiT Network podcast “This Week in Tech,” hosted by Leo Laporte. Laporte offered Revision3’s CEO an opportunity to comment further on MediaDefender’s actions, which he of course took in kind.
In addition to his reiterations of points originally made in its lengthy blog post on the Revision3 website, Louderback revealed that his company likely would not pursue legal action in the form of a lawsuit, describing it as a fairly “small new-media” operation, whose total traffic loss over the three day weekend of May 24-26 may have amounted tens of thousands of dollars. “Maybe $100,000,” he said. All in all, he allowed that it wouldn’t be worth the judicial trouble. As an aside - to be interpreted casually or seriously, it’s hard to say - Louderback said that Revision3 may send an invoice the way of MediaDefender for the artificial denial of service brought on the its business.