The Biggest Ever BitTorrent Leak: MediaDefender Internal Emails Go Public

[Kirby]

Digg - The Biggest Ever BitTorrent Leak: MediaDefender Internal Emails Go Public

When we reported in July that an Anti-Piracy Gang Launches their own Video Download Site to Trap People and that the company was called Media Defender and, as anyone who aims to be a credible news resource would, we checked and double checked our sources. We said, with some confidence:

Media Defender, a notorious anti piracy gang working for the MPAA, RIAA and several independent media production companies, just launched their very own video upload service called “miivi.com”. The sole purpose of the site is to trap people into uploading copyrighted material, and bust them for doing so.

However, in comments made to Ars technica, Media Defender’s Randy Saaf chose to rubbish our claims, calling it an ‘accidentally un-secured internal project’.

From the emails we cannot be sure that it’s an entrapment site or that it is related to the MPAA (perhaps it’s a legit a P2P video client?), but it does look suspicious.

Unfortunately for Media Defender - a company dedicated to mitigating the effects of internet leaks - they can do nothing about being the subject of the biggest BitTorrent leak of all time. Over 700mb of their own internal emails, dating back over 6 months have been leaked to the internet in what will be a devastating blow to the company. Many are very recent, having September 2007 dates and the majority involve the most senior people in the company. Apparently this is not the first time that a MediaDefender email leaked onto the Internet.

According to the .nfo file posted with the Mbox file the emails were obtained by a group called “MediaDefender-Defenders”. It states: “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”

Note: The mbox formatted file is circulating publicly on BitTorrent, completely unedited. However, for publication here we have removed the username and password logins for Media Defender’s servers, and replaced them with asterisks and avoided publishing emails of a personal nature, e.g pay negotiations etc. We believe that the emails are the real deal and all the info posted here serves the public interest.

At first we couldn’t believe that it was real, but after we scanned through the e-mails it became clear that it was indeed the real deal. Hundreds of IPs and logins to their servers, lists of their decoy/entrapment trackers, decoy strategies, the effectiveness of their fake torrents (in many cases with a breakdown of success, title specific), high and low priority sites, .torrent watchlists, information on their monitoring of competitors, pictures of their weekend trips and even the anti-piracy strategy for dealing with The Simpsons Movie leak:

This is just pure gold....

[Hard core Rikki]

Crud, if I suspected anyone would be interested in reading that, I'd have posted it way before you checked that news

The day Sony leaks their anticonsumer internal emails, they can prepare for harakiri already

[Kirby]

Originally Posted by Hard core Rikki

Crud, if I suspected anyone would be interested in reading that, I'd have posted it way before you checked that news

The day Sony leaks their anticonsumer internal emails, they can prepare for harakiri already

Player-X posts alot of **** people don't want to read

[Coolsvilleman]

Wow. Can't someone just fight piracy by creating a legit (not that bit-torrent isn't legit, but I think you understand) easy to use p2p network?

[hushypushy]

Originally Posted by Kirby

Player-X posts alot of **** people don't want to read

Posted

I actually did read this article...interesting stuff. What a bunch of sneaky, underhanded ****holes. They got what was coming to them. I hope this brings the company to its knees...

[Cid Highwind]

Originally Posted by Coolsvilleman

Wow. Can't someone just fight piracy by creating a legit (not that bit-torrent isn't legit, but I think you understand) easy to use p2p network?

Assuming legit means "paid for" then you're living in a dream world. Why pay for something when you can have it for free? There's only downsides if you're going the legit way, such as DRM.

[Coolsvilleman]

Originally Posted by Cid Highwind

Assuming legit means "paid for" then you're living in a dream world. Why pay for something when you can have it for free? There's only downsides if you're going the legit way, such as DRM.

I don't mind paying $10 for a CD of music or say $15-20 for a game. Though that being said you can guess that alot of my games are fairly old... hehehe. Actually I do pay the high prices for games that seem worth it like say Bioshock which was worth it. I think that they don't need to use DRM on p2p networks. Maybe they could just charge a monthly fee or charge per download of song. Like you could unlock a song which would allow you to download it as many times as you like. I'm not sure how it would work because I haven't thought about it much.

An easy way to stop people from downloading is also to limit other peoples uploading. If all ISPs limit upload to say 30kb/s but allow unlimited download speed illegal p2p networking of huge files like movies or application would be almost impossible but would still allow for smaller music files that were purchased. Also companies that hosted the original files could be given unlimited upload to help easy seed. It's just a theory.

[skoreanime]

Interesting read!

P.S.
Kirby, love the avatar-desu .

[cowfez]

Doesn't Cid pay a p2p tax? The government just assumes everyone's pirating and charges a file sharing tax? Or am I just on crack?

[hushypushy]

Originally Posted by Coolsvilleman

Actually I do pay the high prices for games that seem worth it like say Bioshock which was worth it.

Really? My roommate and I both got excited over the demo, but neither of us are down to pay 60 bucks for a game that's (apparently?) only ~10 hours long.

[Hard core Rikki]

Hilarious update:

Digg - MediaDefender leaks phone calls as well

"All your email was belong to us, now all your phone calls are, too"

[doggieiscool]

Pure ownage I must say. Digg it hard.

[Hard core Rikki]

Digg - Leaked Media Defender e-mails reveal secret government project

Where will the horror stop ?? Warning: foundation-shaking stuff

[Homicide]

Jesus christ.

[MiretanK]

CONSPIRACY LOL! Gotta love enterprises' chaos.

[mudlord]

CONSPIRACY LOL! Gotta love enterprises' chaos.

LOL, reminds me of the Enron case