Online TV site tells story of DoS attack

Revision3.com has published a detailed description of the Denial of Service (DoS) attack they suffered during the weekend. The attack originated from MediaDefender, a company that is in the business of stopping the spread of illegal file sharing. Revision3 is a web TV network, creating and producing its own original shows.

The DoS attack overloaded one of the servers and took the entire site offline. After significant effort on part of Revision3's technical staff, the site was eventually put back online. At the peak of the attack, up to 8,000 packets hit the Revision3 server per second.

From Revision3's account of the events: "On the internet, computers say hi with a special type of packet, called 'SYN'. A conversation between devices typically requires just one short SYN packet exchange, before moving on to larger messages containing real data. And most of the traffic cops on the internet – routers, firewalls and load balancers – are designed to mostly handle those larger messages. So a flood of SYN packets, just like a room full of hyperactive screaming toddlers, can cause all sorts of problems. (...) That’s what happened to us."

The majority of packets that caused the shutdown were traced back to MediaDefender, a company which is employed by special interest groups such as MPAA in order to take out online hubs for illegal distribution of music and movies. MediaDefender uses hundreds of servers and a 9GBps dedicated connection to propagate fake files and launch denial of service attacks against media distributors.

In a blog post, Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3, wrote that the company distributes only legal content, and explained in detail what took place during the DDoS attack. He pointed out that Denial of service attacks were illegal in the US under 12 different statutes, including the Economic Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.