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Leaks Prove MediaDefender's Deception
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Sep 17, 2007 08:50 AM
from the well-lookie-there dept.
from the well-lookie-there dept.
Who will defend the defenders? writes "Ars Technica has posted the first installment in their analysis of the leaked MediaDefender emails and found some very interesting things. Apparently, the New York Attorney General's office is working on a big anti-piracy sting and they were working on finding viable targets. It also discusses how some of the emails show MediaDefender trying to spy on their competitors, sanitize their own Wikipedia entry, deal with the hackers targeting their systems, and to quash the MiiVi story even while they were rebuilding it as Viide. Oh yes, they definitely read "techie, geek web sites where everybody already hates us" like Slashdot, too."
Related Stories
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Your Rights Online: MediaDefender Denies Entrapment Accusations 104 comments
Ortega-Starfire writes "We've previously discussed the subject of MediaDefender setting up a site to catch movie pirates. Ars Technica covers the response from MediaDefender, which basically states the entire thing was a mistake and was only an internal site they forgot to password protect, and that they were not using this with the MPAA. The article asks: 'If this is true, why did MediaDefender immediately remove all contact information from the whois registry for the domain? Saaf said that after everything hit the fan, the company decided to take everything on the site down because it was afraid of a hacker attack or "people sending us spam." Yes, spam. The MPAA's Elizabeth Kaltman also chimed in to say that they had no involvement with MiiVi: "The MediaDefender story is false. We have no relationship with that company at all," she told Ars.'"
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IT: Internal Emails of An RIAA Attack Dog Leaked 427 comments
qubezz writes "The company MediaDefender works with the RIAA and MPAA against piracy, setting up fake torrents and trackers and disrupting p2p traffic. Previously, the TorrentFreak site accused them of setting up a fake internet video download site designed to catch and bust users. MediaDefender denied the entrapment charges. Now 700MB of MediaDefender's internal emails from the last 6 months have been leaked onto BitTorrent trackers. The emails detail their entire plan, including how they intended to distance themselves from the fake company they set up and future strategies. Other pieces of company information were included in the emails such as logins and passwords, wage negotiations, and numerous other aspect of their internal business."
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Your Rights Online: MediaDefender and the Streisand Effect 206 comments
Foldarn writes "It looks like MediaDefender, in an effort to quell the explosion of negative publicity over its leaked email archive, has instead done the opposite (also known as the Streisand Effect) and spread it even more widely. Ars Technica is reporting that MediaDefender has sent scary-lawyer letters to two popular BitTorrent sites, MegaNova and IsoHunt, demanding that they remove the offending content. Both sites have responded with derision. Also, Ars notes that MediaDefender seems to be behind a DDoS attack against the site that originally leaked its email." Final word to Ars's Ryan Paul: "MediaDefender's entire business model has been based on recognition of the inescapable fact that litigation cannot stop the spread of content on the Internet, so it is ironic that the company has turned to legal threats."
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Your Rights Online: MediaDefender's BitTorrent-Based DOS Takes Down Revision3 323 comments
Sandman1971 writes "Over the long Memorial Day weekend, Revision3 was the target of a malicious Denial Of Service Attack which brought R3 to its knees. After investigating the matter, it was discovered that the source of the attacks came from MediaDefender, the famed company hired by the MPAA and RIAA to try and stop the spread of illegal file sharing. The kicker? Revision3 was taken down for running a bittorent tracker to distribute its own legal content."
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Mixed feelings... (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, I hope people keep this incident in mind if they are considering going to work for a disreputable company, a company whose primary missions is screwing people, especially when those people that are being screwed have a Robin Hood-like reputation and are a lot smarter than you. The sad fact is that there will undoubtedly be a lot of collateral damage due to this episode. As pointed out in the Ars Technica article, a secretary who happened to be working for MediaDefender whose worst crime was answering phones and getting coffee for his or her bosses now has the social security number, home address and phone number, and salary information out there for everyone to download and look at.
I think that an even worse fallout of all this is that companies are going to be even more anal about stuff like e-mail policies and such. At my company now, they content-block us from accessing Gmail. I'll be that companies will start doing crap like blocking employees from even sending e-mail to Gmail now, the attack vector that allowed these e-mails to get leaked.
But still, even after having said all that, I love it when an evil company doing evil things gets their due like this. It's entirely possible that MediaDefender might go out of business because of this. If you're one of their customers whose detailed contract information got leaked, how likely are you to do business with them again? Although it occurred in a totally scummy way that I just can't endorse, I can't deny the end result of big media companies being a little more skittish to hiring these outfits to do their dirty work is a Good Thing.
Re:Mixed feelings... (Score:5, Informative)
One MD scumbag then forwards this email to his lackeys and he adds: "If you want a good laugh" to the forwarded mail.
These scumbag know that what they are doing is worthless, it doesn't stop piracy, but they both piss off users and rip off their own clients.
They also received one confidential study from a think-tank in Washington DC, the nice presentation had some extremely disgusting stats: only about 17% of the piracy comes from illegal downloads, the vast majority comes from people borrowing CDs
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Thank God for Data Protection (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Thank God for Data Protection (Score:5, Interesting)
This doesn't stop the need for laws which are much more clear and restrictive on the use and control of personally identifying information, and which have more bite when they are enforced.
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Re:Mixed feelings... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Mixed feelings... (Score:5, Insightful)
and at the bottom line you'll only find the bottom feeders.
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Re:Mixed feelings... (Score:4, Insightful)
Spot on. Granted, businesses are there to make money, but unless they employ only robots, there is a human factor there as well. Oversimplifying this to the point that "money trumps everything else" is exactly how these companies get into such shitloads of trouble.
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Re:Mixed feelings... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, and more: Businesses are not there just to make money, I'm getting tired of this old trope. It's like saying Humans are there to make more Humans.
Enterprise means getting things done, making stuff, acheiving goals. Businesses are there to do things and compensate their investors and staff for their efforts or risk-taking. People start a business (or should) because they want to provide, create, or change something. Let them be judged by what they do and how they do it, not how much they've managed to skim off the top.
Let's not reduce capitalism to The Trough, it's nihilistic and will lead people further into market fundamentalism.
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A lesson from this episode (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's recent downplaying of the unexplained Windows Updates is another case in point. Where is Mark Russinovich's article that does a 'diff' of the replaced files, and explaining the 'new behaviour' in detail - like he did in the Sony rootkit case?
It is a bit sad that many of these incidents do not figure in the mainstream media - which seems to be in the powerful grips of these Corporate thugs.
Re:A lesson from this episode (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:A lesson from this episode (Score:5, Insightful)
I did address this issue in my original post. I speculated that this happens becasue Mainstream Media is simply reluctant to publish these issues, which have a vital bearing on true competition in the IT industry. The BBC has an article on the EU anti-trust ruling; but none at all on the Media Defender clowns circus. If it did, there would be much larger pressure on them, than discussions at Slashdot, Digg, Flexbeta ArsTechnica and so on.
In fact an email at MD discusses precisely this apathy in the mainstream media; and why they should relaunch the whole thing under a different name. Microsoft has simply relaunched the same core Office applications and the Windows operating systems in different names at different points in time. The intention is clear: To subvert proper competitive development, impede progress, ruthlessly maintain lock-in; etc. The media must resist such intereferences... otherwise such secondary media sites will make take away their business in tech reporting at least.
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Totally Unprofessional (Score:5, Insightful)
Now don't get me wrong. I'm neither squeamish, nor easily offended. But in professional, corporate email communications such a tone has about as much justification as surfing porn at work.
Re:Totally Unprofessional (Score:5, Interesting)
And to that point - it is their JOB to surf porn at work, to seek out child porn and notify the DoJ and the New York Attorney General's office of the material so that the AG could pursue the offender as part of their own investigation.
Yet, I do agree that the use of profanity does show a lack of professionalism. Much like the theory that you can tell a lot about a man by the way he treats his waitress. These emails reveal that they have an air of arrogant superiority about themselves, that they operate above the law, and that they are immune from "teh bad d00dz". They are convinced of their moral authority and moral superiority.
To wit:
I have a fair level of certainty that they got themselves infected with spyware, adware, trojans. They surf sites in the dark corners of the 'intertoob' seeking out nefarious content, evil trackers and child predators. In going there, they are in the stomping grounds of the best of the worst when it comes to infecting computers using the most current 0day exploits.
(Side note -- Stick with me here)
I personally do not run anti-virus. I deal with malicious content all the time. I know what is running on my machine at all times. If I were to run an AntiVirus, it would delete half the files on my hard drive that was gathered as evidence in investigations, or malicious tool kits used to exploit systems that I use in teaching classes.
Whenever I venture to evil sites, I start up a virtual machine, I have two - they are called "Hindenburg" and "Titanic" that are not current on their patches and run no anti-virus. I purposely seek out infections and malware on these machines so I can analyze the machines postmortem. I have a tremendous amount of respect and even admiration for my opponents. They are VERY good at their game. As such, I am careful not to let my guard down.
(My point)
I'll bet that what they've done is get a real machine infected, one that was not sandboxed, connected to the internal domain, and the user was running with not just local admin privileges, but with full domain admin privileges. OOPS! This infected machine reported back to the hackers, who then connected back in to their hacked box and set up user accounts on the network and also rooted the boxes.
At this point, no amount of changing passwords or firewalls or IDS will get the intruders out. They need to rebuild every box on their network, from scratch. They need to stop thinking of themselves as an "academic institution" that needs full access to the internet (no outbound restrictions on the firewall) and where proper security practices "don't apply to them".
Proper security and safety protocols were not followed. The arrogant attitude of "we're security folks, policies don't apply to us" is what let this happen.
Further your affiant sayeth not,
Joel Helgeson
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Re:Actually (Score:5, Interesting)
Heh, they all but went out of their way to provide access to the hackers. The top brass had his emails being forwarded to his Gmail account, bypassing any and all security they had set up on the corporate network.
Then the hackers got the usernames and passwords and gained internal access to the network, establishing admin access on the domain. They apparently set up packet captures, or if MediaDefender were the ones capturing packets, they found them and this is where they captured the VoIP calls.
"Keyloggers, we don't need no stinking keyloggers!"
The worst infections to get rid of are those who have admin access to the network and who maintain their access using normal everyday network admin utilities (From my experience, the French are especially good at this). I have worked with sites that have been hacked where the intruders have obtained an administrator level password, then gone in and set up RPC over HTTPS on the domain servers, then the hackers have set up their own 2003 server, added it to the domain, promoted it to domain controller and had the hacked company's Domain Controller perform an outbound sync (using the RPC over HTTPS) to the hackers 2003 server. Any password changes the users make on the home network will be replicated to their off site "guest host" malicious server.
The hackers later added Distributed File Shares or DFS, and used it to replicate file shares (i.e. user folders) information to their hacked domain controller. The hackers basically set themselves up as a run-of-the-mill remote office that synchronizes over a low-speed wan link.
This company was totally Pwn3d... I wouldn't be surprised to see the same thing happened here with the amount of information they collected.
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there are more leaks! (Score:5, Informative)
MediaDefender Phone Call and Gnutella Tracking Database Leaked [torrentfreak.com]
The weakest link (Score:4, Interesting)
Journamalism 101 (Score:5, Interesting)
I know it's pointless to ask things like this of the /. "editors", but the summary of this story is almost completely useless to anyone who is coming to the story cold (like me).
Would it have killed someone to have rewritten the submission so that it explained:
?
I can go Google all that stuff and find out for myself, but why would I bother, if it's not clear to me why the story is important in the first place?
Re:Journamalism 101 (Score:5, Informative)
A group called "MediaDefender-Defender" got someone's password and spilled thousands of emails from within MediaDefender. Apparently some idiot forwarded all his corporate mail to Gmail, and used an easy password.
"MiiVi" was an attempt by MediaDefender to create a fake file-sharing site to entrap people. About two people fell for it, then they were exposed by Torrentfreak.
You should care because this company lied about its involvement with an attempt to "entrap" (legally, it's not entrapment, but it's still pretty morally grey). You might also care because it's another attempt by the RIAA and MPAA to screw over file-sharers. Or maybe you don't care about it. There's no assurance that you'll find everything on Slashdot interesting.
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Online mailbox access.. (Score:5, Informative)
In case someone wants to have a look, Here is a on-line mailbox with all the leaked emails [hopto.org]
viide.com (Score:5, Funny)
No attempt to get comments from the AG's office? (Score:5, Interesting)
A quick search this am for "new york attorney general mediadefender" turned up no mainstream press reports about this story.
According the ars piece, by the way, the AG's office appeared to be interested in porn downloads, not, as the editors here put it, "working on a big anti-piracy sting and they were working on finding viable targets." From TFA, "Although the full scope of the project cannot be extrapolated from the e-mails, the information available indicates that MediaDefender intends to provide the Attorney General's office with information about users accessing pornographic content. Other kinds of information could be involved as well." (That last sentence is so vague and general that it could refer to almost any information of any kind anywhere on the planet.)
Don't the editors at least read the stories themselves before they post them to Slashdot?
None of these comments is a defense of either MediaDefender or the NYAG. I'm more concerned about the shoddy reporting that passes for journalism on geek news sites like this one and arstechnica. Particularly the latter, since the articles I've read there in the past gave off the semblance of decent journalism.
Re:No attempt to get comments from the AG's office (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Good Time . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Morally, these scumbags gave up any claim to anything a long time ago. Morally, they all deserve to be soundly beaten and left for dead on some island somewhere so they can learn to play nice with each other or starve. Because that's sadly illegal, pointing and laughing at their misfortune is a close second.
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Re:Sanitizing Wikipedia is bad? (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia is clear that it is AGAINST policy to self-edit. Read the Code of Conduct.
Just because they don't have a very effective police force preventing rude, deceptive bullcrap does mpt mean it is acceptable behavior.
And YES, changing what OTHER people wrote about you without admitting who you are IS an indication of guilt. When I defend myself from something I do NOT do it anonymously.
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Re:so (Score:5, Informative)
Even if we all want to cheer MD-D, it remains that what they did was very likely a violation of a number of user policy agreements (Gmail, their ISP, etc.) and possibly illegal. Let's not start adorning them with medals yet.
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