MediaDefender Hacker Speaks Out
Written by Enigmax & Ernesto on January 14, 2008In September 2007, anti-piracy company MediaDefender’s emails went public after a hacker gained access to their systems. The attacks cost the company a huge amount of money, not to mention acute embarrassment. Now the person behind the attacks speaks.
The whole Media Defender scandal needs little introduction. The anti-piracy company is incredibly unpopular with most of the file-sharing community, so when they fell victim to a hacker and their company secrets spread all over the Internet, few held much sympathy for them.
Soon it became known that a shadowy group known as MediaDefender-Defenders appeared to be behind the attack - they host the Media Defender emails on their website to this day, but little was known about the chain events, or who was behind them - until now.
In an interview with portfolio, the hacker (using the pseudonym ‘Ethan’) explains how things led up to the leak. Ethan, a polite high-school student who lives with his family, was on his Christmas break when he first gained access to the anti-piracy companies servers by exploiting a weakness in their firewall. This was the end of 2006, at a time when business was still good for Media Defender, with revenue standing at nearly $16m.
The interviewer, Daniel Roth, says he communicated with Ethan on pre-pay phone to ensure security. Meeting after school in a local bookstore, Ethan handed over a flash drive holding confidential Media Defender information, explaining that the initial security breach hadn’t amounted to much and that he had difficulty in gaining the interest of fellow hackers. However, a few months later Ethan decided to go back and take a second look - which bore more fruit - giving him access to the company’s email, it’s networked resources and even its telephone system. He then explains how he passed on some of the information to a fellow hacker who gained access to Media Defender servers and used them for denial-of-service attacks.
Logging in a handful of times each month through the summer of 2007, Ethan started to get bored with ‘Monkey Defenders’ - his pet name for the anti-piracy outfit. Deciding to go out with a bang, he and the Media Defender-Defenders gathered thousands of the company’s internal emails and published them on web.
A text file included with the emails stated: “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,” and “A special thanks to Jay Maris, for circumventing there entire email-security by forwarding all your emails to your gmail account”
Just days later, slamming the anti-piracy company again and again seemed to be the aim of Ethan and friends, as they released a private telephone conversation with the New York attorney general’s office, a P2P tracking database, followed a few days later by all of Media Defender’s anti-piracy tools.
Ethan said that he didn’t set out to ruin Media Defender: “In the beginning, I had no motivation against Monkey Defenders” he said. “It wasn’t like, ‘I want to hack those bastards’. But then I found something, and the good nature in me said, These guys are not right. I’m going to destroy them.”
Ethan, who is now sought after by the FBI because of the leaked emails, is getting close to this goal. It all went downhill for MediaDefender after the leaks got out. In November it turned out that MediaDefender’s parent company ArtistDirect lost almost $1,000,000 because of the hack, and their stock price plunged soon after that.
To make it even worse, a week after the sensitive information was made public, the Pirate Bay launched a counterattack against their arch rival. They decided to use the information from the emails to file charges against some of MediaDefenders customers including Paramount Home Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox and Universal Music Group for corrupting and sabotaging their BitTorrent tracker.
There is no doubt that the pirates have won this battle, and it will be very hard for MediaDefender to regain their credibility. To quote MediaDefender CEO Randy Saaf: “This is really fucked…”. Yes, I’m afraid it is Randy.
Previously: Video: How People Are Tracked Using BitTorrent
Next: Trading BitTorrent Tracker Invites – Commodity or Curse?
104 Responses (Add yours or TrackBack)
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1st!
Let’s hope “Ethan” doesn’t get caught.
Yes but thats just it, they won the battle, I cant see pirates winning the war :-/
Goooo Ethan lol
Unlike you el90 i can see pirates winning the war.
I love that story.
THIS IS REALLY FUCKED…
poo
If Ethan gets caught he will be thrown in jail, and they will throw the key away…
Maybe he will..
But if that happens, more and more sites/companies/etc will get taken down.
As well as this, more hackers will spawn up in Ethans (and anyone elses) place.
Its a pirate war, so it’ll never end. ;)
Go Ethan! I wish you all the luck and skill you need to keep the muppets at bay! You have done the world a service and you should be thanked, not chased by the FBI.
So THAT’S what happened.
Good luck to him.
Thank you very much Ethan, good job :)
[quote comment="263268"]Let’s hope “Ethan” doesn’t get caught.[/quote]
[quote comment="263296"]If Ethan gets caught he will be thrown in jail, and they will throw the key away…[/quote]
Not really. He will have the support of the US piracy party.
“This is really fucked…” Quite.
Fuck Media Defender (even though ‘Ethan’ already has).
Sickness is right, war on ‘piracy’ is a war that those against it cannot win, but all the pirates need to win it is get a couple of laws changed, i’m backing the pirates (obviously).
aaaaaarrrrrrr! FIRE THE EBOMB CANNONS!
I hope more hackers will follow soon by fucking over any anti-p2p companie they can.
If we arent allowed to download copyrighted material than why the hell are those fucking companies allowed to spam/flood bittorent sites with FAKE torrents and getting money for it.
Not to mention they actualy ruin people’s life with demanding big sums of money for their “ilegal activities”
FUCK media-defender and mediasentry and any other asshole companies
nit-picky note:
it says “their stock prize plunged”.
Do you mean stock price? The word could be taken out entirely, leaving you with, “their stock plunged”.
Whoop Whooop Fuck you MediaDefender people, Teaches you to skrew with the torrent community!
Top Effort Ethan!
FBI are after him?
So it’s ok for Media companies to break laws but no-one else?
Typical.
Lets keep up the fight.
Well done Ethan.
Bittorrent: New
P2P: New
Fast internet: New
Piracy: OLDER THAN GOD!!!
good job ethan. Fight action with action =]
lol
Hey you guys, Did you know that media-defender does exactly what they are fighting against –> downloading.
acording to their website you can find this piece of text:
In addition to anti-piracy solutions, MediaDefender also offers a Leak Alert service. Our industry leading Leak Team scours Newsgroups, Usenet, and BitTorrent sites to see what cracked/pirated content has most recently leaked. Upon discovery, MediaDefender will DOWNLOAD the leak and either send it or provide a secure ftp login for customers to sample the pirated material.
ethan is my hero
I agree, its a virtual war… It will never end as long as there is technology around… I love how he was only in High School though..
From reliable sources I know that MediaDefender employees released many movies illegally themselves. ;-)
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