MediaDefender is a company which offers services designed to prevent and stop people who engage in peer-to-peer copyright infringement, using tactics such as flooding peer-to-peer networks with decoy files that tie up a user's computer. IT was widely speculated that MediaDefender was behind the creation of Video upload site www.miivi.com and was working in conjunction with anti-piracy groups such as the MPAA. This claim was denied and ridiculed by MediaDefender executives but latest e-mail leak suggest otherwise. 9 months of MediaDefender's internal mails containing information ranging from their server logins to weekend trip photos have been leaked to bit torrent by a group called MediaDefender-Defenders. Their upload notice reads:
-={ MediaDefender-Defenders }=-
Date: 2007-09-15
MediaDefender-Defenders proudly presents 9 months worth of internal MediaDefender emails.
By releasing these emails we hope to secure the privacy and personal integrity of all peer-to-peer users. The emails contains information about the various tactics and technical solutions for tracking p2p users, and disrupt p2p services.
A special thanks to Jay Maris, for circumventing there entire email-security by forwarding all your emails to your gmail account, and using the really highly secure password: blahbob
So here it is, we hope this is enough to create a viable Defense to the tactics used by these companies, also there should be enough fuel to keep the p2p bloggers busy for quite some time.
-={ MediaDefender-Defenders }=-
The e-mails confirm that miivi was actually a fake site designed to lure unsuspecting video uploaders and later sue them for copyright infringement. E-mails also reveal various anti-p2p strategies used by MediaDefender (including the use of fake trackers and uploading of fake torrents) to pollute bittorrent traffic. For example, their anti-p2p strategy to reduce "The Simpson Movie" torrent downloads is as mentioned below:
# REMINDER: “The Simpson’s Movie” premieres this Friday (to Torrents).
- Decoy files are available in torrents MDfile server.
- Use Public Trackers for pre-Leak releases.
- Create two new trackers for this project.
- Ebert to inform Torrents of these new machines.
- Send a list of 5 release names from each torrent team member to Ebert.
- REMEMBER to input torrent file into interdiction if a real Leak is available this weekend.
-Quoted from a leaked internal e-mail :p
If anyone is interested in reading the mails, you can find them here. 700MB of text files are compressed into a 134MB multi part RAR file. Once you are done UnRARing, you'll find .mbox files which contain the mails. Open these with any text editor (i.e. Notepad, Wordpard, TextPad, UltraEDIT, etc) and laugh at the misery of almighty Media Defender.
Read more on this at: TorrentFreak, The Pirate Bay Blog
