Revision 3 Under DDoS by ... MediaDefender

This has been around the twitter world and it is funny and serious. Some days ago Revision 3, a new media company that distribute their content via Internet was under a DDoS attack. They just released in their blog that the attack came by no other than MediaDefender. MediaDefender is a dark company paid by content distributors in order to disrupt, hack and to do other non ethical activities with the flag of "Anti-piracy". It results that Revision 3 uses bittorrent, a very common P2P tool to distribute ITS OWN content.

Many questions raise with these actions. What was Mediadefense doing against Revision3? Are legal their actions? What are the MediaDefender's criteria to "disrupt" torrent sources?

I honestly hope that Revision 3 take some legal action against this attack. I think that is enough with the danger that website owners face today with attacks from botnets, it is not good to add more attack sources such as this type of companies.

New Updates in my research page

I just realized that my research page it is a little bit difficult to manage and that I was using my wiki like a blog. So I will do some changes. Among them I plan to integrate and use more web 2.0 technologies, e.g. I will add my papers in CiteUlike, I will manage my links in Del.icio.us with tags, I will post some news using twitter and Yahoo Pipes and so on. Probably I even will start using Google Sites to host the pages instead of the university infrastructure.

DDoS attacks in the Olympics?

According to Jean-Michel Louboutin, Executive Director of Interpol Police the main security risk in the Olympic Games is the physical security of the visitors (and Chinese people as well). I agree with that, however I think that in the interview with PCWorld he subestimate the effect of a DDoS attack. The Chinese Internet infrastructure might be stronger against a DDoS than Estonian, but in a synchronized attack some services such as news reports or the Internet communication of visitors may be compromised. It is true that according to MessageLabs the infamous botnet "Storm" seems to shrunk; although these are good news (and less DoS could be launch) we are not sure if the small size of Storm is due to better security practices or just that another group of hackers has taken control of the botnet.

I read a comment in the Bruce Schneier's Blog about security: Never say "never", "this is impossible", "this will not happen". I honestly wish to be wrong, but I am sure that it will be more than one attack against the olimpyc infrastructure and at least one will success.

This post in spanish