Inside the Attack that Crippled Revision3

revision3.com ^ | May 29, 2008 | Jim Louderback

[HAL9000]

Excerpt -

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.

~ snip ~

That’s what happened to us. Another device on the internet flooded one of our servers with an overdose of SYN packets, and it shut down – bringing the rest of Revision3 with it. In webspeak it’s called a Denial of Service attack – aka DoS – and it happens when one machine overwhelms another with too many packets, or messages, too quickly. The receiving machine attempts to deal with all that traffic, but in the end just gives up.

(Note the photo of our server equipment responding to the DoS Attack)

In its coverage Tuesday CNet asked the question, “Now who would want to attack Revision3?” Who indeed? So we set out to find out.

~ snip ~

[knittnmom]

Thanks - that was a neat article. The best explanation of a DoS I’ve seen. Hope you sue them back into the Iron Age.

[Moose4]

So Mediadefender finds Rev3’s distribution Bittorrent servers and starts injecting crap content into them to try and foul up the folks downloading “pirated” content—even though Rev3 had NO non-legit content on them at the time. Then when a Rev3 forum poster notes that they’ve got what looks like a pirated copy of Rambo on their BT tracker, Rev3 closes the back door. Mediadefender cries havoc and lets slip the SYN packets of war.

If the FBI does their job on this one, and if there’s any justice, Mediadefender is burnt toast.

}:-)4