Anti-piracy company MediaDefender gets worked over by hackers

MediaDefender is a company based in Los Angeles that offers, (to quote from their website), “anti-piracy solutions in the emerging Internet-Piracy-Prevention (IPP) industry.”

Whether a handful of online businesses constitute an industry -- and furthermore, an industry deserving of its very own acronym -- may have been some of the issues that triggered a recent slew of hacker-attacks against the MediaDefender company. Another possible issue that could of aggrieved the hackers could also include MediaDefender's aggressive, and some would say 'dirty', anti-piracy tactics.

According to Silicon Valley 'tech gossip rag' Valleywag, a ragtag group of hackers and other criminally-inclined cyber-deviants managed to compromise the emails' system of the MediaDefender company. These anti-anti-piracy proponents uncovered, in these nefariously obtained, cyber-jacked emails, plans that MediaDefender had to construct a ersatz (fake) BitTorrent site called MiiVi. The fake BitTorrent site would be serve as a DRM-free honey-pot, to lure media pirates across the InterWeb, and towards illicit P2P gains.

Reportedly, the theorized MiiVi site would attempt to take over computer systems, then zombify them, in order to enlist them into the fledgling IPP industry. Plans for the MiiVi site also included the logging of all IP addresses, in order that an absolute, certainest copyright-violation victory would be achieved by MediaDefender.

However, these plans were thwarted by these recent hacking attempts.

And more recently, further hacking attempts have ensued against MediaDefender. This mysterious hacker-types coalition -- who now refer to themselves as the MediaDefenders-Defenders -- have released almost 6000 of MediaDefender's internal emails to the Internet's masses. To add insult to further injury, two days ago, a half-hour recording of a VOIP conversation between MediaDefender and the New York Attorney General's office was packaged into a torrent and put up on the notorious torrent-transfer station, The Pirate Bay, by the aforementioned group.

Ironically, the leaked conversation between the representative of MediaDefender, and a New York attorney, deals with the security of their email servers, at one point.

Presumably, MediaDefender is regaining control of their internal security devices.

Sept.20th update: MediaDefender is really, really getting monkey wrenches thrown at them from the MediaDefenders-Defenders. Latest news is that the source code for their anti-piracy software was released onto the torrent-tracker networks. Looks like they should really start digging some trenches around their servers, filling the trenches with gasoline, and lighting the firewalls on fire to try to better get a handle on their security situation. I guess the horse already left the barn, however. Follow this link to TorrentFreak for more information regarding this unrelenting assualt on MediaDefender .