Revision3 Was Attacked Over the Weekend!

Over the Memorial Day weekend, Revision3, the leading IPTV content company was attacked by a DoS attack. The FBI has been called in… whoa!

Inside the Attack that Crippled Revision3

Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3 tells the whole story: “As many of you know, Revision3’s servers were brought down over the Memorial Day weekend by a denial of service attack. It’s an all too common occurrence these days. But this one wasn’t your normal cybercrime – there’s a chilling twist at the end. Here’s what happened, and why we’re even more concerned today, after it’s over, than we were on Saturday when it started.” Read the whole story at the link… but here’s a bit more:

“A bit of address translation, and we’d discovered our nemesis. But instead of some shadowy underground criminal syndicate, the packets were coming from right in our home state of California. In fact, we traced the vast majority of those packets to a public company called Artistdirect (ARTD.OB). Once we were able to get their internet provider on the line, they verified that yes, indeed, that internet address belonged to a subsidiary of Artist Direct, called MediaDefender. Now why would MediaDefender be trying to put Revision3 out of business? Heck, we’re one of the biggest defenders of media around. So I stopped by their website and found that MediaDefender provides ‘anti-piracy solutions in the emerging Internet-Piracy-Prevention industry.’ The company aims to ‘stop the spread of illegally traded copyrighted material over the internet and peer-to-peer networks.’ Hmm. We use the internet and peer-to-peer networks to accelerate the spread of legally traded materials that we own. That’s sort of directly opposite to what Media Defender is supposed to be doing. Who pays MediaDefender to disrupt peer to peer networks? I don’t know who’s ponying up today, but in the past their clients have included Sony, Universal Music, and the central industry groups for both music and movies – the RIAA and MPAA. According to an article by Ars Technica, the company uses ‘its array of 2,000 servers and a 9GBps dedicated connection to propagate fake files and launch denial of service attacks against distributors.’ Another Ars Technica story claims that MediaDefender used a similar denial of service attack to bring down a group critical of its actions.”

“… In the end, I don’t think Media Defender deliberately targeted Revision3 specifically. However, the company has a history of using their servers to, as Ars Technica said, ‘launch denial of service attacks against distributors.’ They saw us as a ‘distributor’ – even though we were using Bittorrent for legitimate reasons. Once we shut them out, their vast network of servers were automatically programmed to implement a scorched earth policy, and shut us down in turn. The long Memorial Day weekend holiday made it impossible for us to contact either Media Defender or their ISP, which only exacerbated the problem. All I want, for Revision3, is to get our weekend back – both the countless hours spent by our heroic tech staff attempting to unravel the mess, and the revenue, traffic and entertainment that we didn’t deliver. If it can happen to Revision3, it could happen to your business too. We’re simply in the business of delivering entertainment and information – that’s not life or death stuff. But what if MediaDefender discovers a tracker inside a hospital, fire department or 911 center? If it happened to us, it could happen to them too. In my opinion, Media Defender practices risky business, and needs to overhaul how it operates. Because in this country, as far as I know, we’re still innocent until proven guilty – not drawn, quartered and executed simply because someone thinks you’re an outlaw.”

VMware Invests in a System Management Company

VMware goes up against Microsoft! Cool!

VMware invests in an SMT provider in its battle against Microsoft

“Public perception is half the battle, especially when the prize is a virtual one. Yesterday, VMware placed a big bet that it could be perceived as a full-service provider like Microsoft, by acquiring a systems management tool company called B-hive. Last year, Microsoft officials admitted they didn’t hold any expectations for their company to suddenly become perceived as the world leader in virtualization, even if they end up outshipping VMware or Citrix XenSource quantitatively by virtue of the availability of Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008. But it did intend to leverage its existing position not only as an operating system provider but as an indisputable competitor in systems management tools, as a way to offer customers at least a complete package. This may have sent a clarion call to VMware that, if it wants to maintain its stronghold on the specialty of virtualization, it may need to expand its reach somewhat into the areas where Microsoft has leverage. Yesterday, VMware did that in an almost Microsoft-like fashion: by acquiring B-hive, the producer of an IT infrastructure performance monitoring tool called Conductor that’s geared toward virtualized server environments. B-hive Conductor is an intriguing product whose claim to fame is its capability to dynamically map all the components in an IT infrastructure — both real and virtual — by monitoring database transactions triggered by service-oriented applications, and following how servers respond. It literally appears to “ride piggy-back” along with transactions, and in so doing, making sure the way they’re distributed and processed is in compliance with binding service-level agreements (SLAs).”