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Revision3 Blames MediaDefender for Attack

Revision3 says anti-piracy company MediaDefender is responsible for a DDoS that knocked its site offline.

A distributed denial of Service (DDoS) attack that knocked online video site Revision3 offline for most of the Memorial Day weekend originated from the servers of MediaDefender, a controversial company involved in anti-piracy efforts, according to Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback. Revision3, a sister company to Digg, was operating a BitTorrent tracker to help circulate its own files - a legal use of the peer-to-peer software. Louderback claims MediaDefender injected torrent files into its tracker. When Revision3 took steps to prevent outside parties from storing files on its tracker, Louderback says MediaDefender servers began hitting the Revision3 network with up to 8,000 SYN packets a second:

Revision3 suffered measurable harm to its business due to that flood of packets, as the attacks on our legitimate and legal Torrent Tracking server spilled over into our entire internet infrastructure. Thus we were unable to serve videos and advertising through much of the weekend, and into Tuesday