MediaDefender’s Decoy Effectiveness on BitTorrent Sites
Written by Ernesto on September 22, 2007MediaDefender’s email and anti piracy tool leaks gave the world a unique insight into the workings and the effectiveness of their BitTorrent decoy operations. So how effective were they? And which sites were best protected against these fake torrents? Let’s find out.
MediaDefender determines the effectiveness of their spoofs and decoys by analyzing the top search results for the file in question, mostly movies and music albums. If 2 out of 10 top search results are fake files spread by them, their effectiveness is 20% on that particular BitTorrent site. Their goals is of course to get as many fake files in there, hoping people will end up downloading useless data.
There is a lot of variance in the reported effectiveness between BitTorrent sites and the different decoy projects. We scanned through most of the reports and it seems that The Pirate Bay and Mininova were best protected against fake files whereas MediaDefender was more effective on sites like BiteNova and TorrentPortal.
Niek from Mininova, the toughest site to get onto according to MediaDefender, wrote a blog post in response to the leaked MediaDefender emails. He sums up some of the quotes that show how well protected Mininova is. Niek adds, “We can only be grateful for the many nice words from our friends at MediaDefender. All thanks go to our great moderating team, who did (and do) great work.”
The Pirate Bay has always been one of MediaDefender’s main targets because this site is often mentioned in the press. Unfortunately for MediaDefender The Pirate Bay is also one of the sites that is well protected against fake files.
In July, Brokep from The Pirate Bay already told us that they were doing all they can to block Media Defender from accessing their trackers. “We block them and some other torrent sites do as well.” he said.
This apparently annoyed MediaDefender, as we can see from one of their emails regarding the effectiveness of their decoys for Micheal Moore’s Sicko: “we still have no presence on Pirate bay which is a site they [Weinstein?] are likely watching as it was mentioned in the AdAge article they referenced.”
Here is an example of an effectiveness report for “Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer” based on the top search results. Note that an effectiveness of 100% means that all the torrents that showed up in the search results (top 6/10/15) were fake.
BiteNova: 100%
Bittorrent.am 27%
Btjunkie 20%
Btmon 15%
BushTorrent 100%
ExtraTorrent 47%
Fenopy 100%
FlixFlux 23%
FullDLS 32%
IsoHunt 100%
Meganova 100%
Mininova 0%
Monova 35%
MyBittorrent 91%
NewTorrents 0%
Novatina 98%
PirateBay 0%
Snarf-it 74%
TorrentBox 32%
TorrentLocomotive 47%
TorrentPortal 100%
TorrentReactor 0%
TorrentSpy 4%
TorrentValley 77%
TorrentView 27%
Torrentz 22%
Underground 0%
WorldNova 97%
Yotoshi 92%
Previously: PirateBay Fires a Broadside of Complaints to Police
Next: Porn Industry Infighting As Pirate Bay Takes On Big Media
55 Responses
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Too all the torrent trackers that got 0% fake files, good job!
Yay for Canada! Media Defender can’t touch me. Ize getz to gloatz all I want. Sux2bu, MediaDefender. By the way they aren’t defending shit, it’s the same as giving crack to someone then arresting him for illegal possession.
…By the way who wants to join in a huge DOS attack against MediaDefender? Just to screw them over. Come on guys, it’ll be fun!111oneone
@23:
Maybe they ran the sampling tests not at the same time, thus the fake torrents were allready purged from the database when the did the second test on the other site.
Quote:
who is that butt ugly people in the pic??
Actually is the CEO of MediaDefender
Randy Saaf and his associate..
Quote:
MediaDefender boss Randy Saaf (left) and sidekick Octavio Herrera are being questioned by Las Vegas Police.
SOURCE see here: http://www.p2pnet.net/story/13397
Quote:
who is that butt ugly people in the pic??
Actually is the CEO of MediaDefender
Randy Saaf and his associate..
Quote:
MediaDefender boss Randy Saaf (left) and sidekick Octavio Herrera are being questioned by Las Vegas Police.
SOURCE see here: p2pnet.net/story/13397
he looks like a condescending prick.
funny how stuff like that seeps through a photo.
The picture at the top is photoshopped to make them have sad faces, just like the photo on the p2pnet article photoshops handcuffs around their arms.
If they spoof big torrents on shitty trackers its not a big problem cause those trackers are usually there to find something rather rare, whereas for something popular pirate bay is always the way to go
Glad to see my personal favorite (Demonoid) is no where even on that list.
I hope these asshats learn a lesson. You cannot possibly win against all of us. Hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people are going to do exactly what they want to do…and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.
haha it amazes me that they judge their effectiveness by the top 10 of the crappy public torrent sites. learn to scratch beneath the surface…so many great private trackers with better quality files, speeds, and any user uploading decoys or fakes would be banned within about 2 minutes.
So funny that they failed miserable at sabotaging those public sites, imagine them trying to make an impact on the private bittorrent scene, haha and much repect to tpb for sticking it to them
How does SuperNova rank on the fake scale?
IRC works fine , get on efnet, then /join #mediadefender-defenders
The original archives (all) plus a variety of similar legal case documents (1991-current) are available http/ftp and local torrent tracker for all files from
http://MDD.BlueNorway.Org
MDD.BlueNorway.Org
35 Sep 23, 2007 at 20:34 by nasagov
IRC works fine , get on efnet, then /join #mediadefender-defenders
in what network?
[quote]in what network?[/quote]
he said efnet..
Hopefully this can motivate the vulnerable sites to take action so that this problem will not happen again.
Any of the site admins are welcome to use TorrentSpam.com to report fake torrents.
Sorry for the shameless plug ;-)
I’m glad they liked my photoshop. :)
Great article once again, TF!
Their figures are INCORRECT.
BushTorrent 100%
TorrentReactor 0%
^– The above makes NO sense seeing as bushtorrent and torrentreactor share the SAME database. Id 1234 at bushtorrent is the same as id 1234 at torrent reactor.
Makes me wonder how in the hell they we’re really calulating that.
Maybe, as someone mentioned earlier, BushTorrent lists their search results by speed rather than date posted. That would explain why the same DB gives different results.
Actually, the top 10 on public sites is as far as most people will ever look. They’re targetting mainstream unsavvy users, not you - keep that in mind. As a general rule of any large-scale effort for that matter.
ultimately ineffective. fantastic four 4 voted gayest movie of the year by most techies. try faking something people might actually want to download.
[quote comment="170998"]on topic:
bittorrent is self-verifying if downloaders leave comments and the index is moderated
torrent moderation really makes the difference. in their rush to get big many sites lost it[/quote]
NASAs!saddens inhibits?guaranteer,slaying courtly puff
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