Who Are The Real Defenders?

Recently a company called Media Defender launched a SYN attack on a legitimate website called Revision3. This company runs a private torrent tracker which it uses to distribute its own media on the net. Their administrators noticed that someone was trying to exploit a security hole in their system, and when they locked down that hole the attackers retaliated with a SYN attack shutting down the site for the weekend going into Tuesday. They didn't just shut down their Bit Torrent setup, the shut down their FTP and their e-mail when the attack spilled over into the other servers. They caused a measurable amount of damage to an innocent site because the may have been exploited by someone else as well.

Media Defender is trying to say that this was all unintentional (well, at least the part where they hit a legit company). Of course, they did mean to run a SYN attack against the host, and they were loading fake torrents onto the host. They're just saying they didn't realize the host was legit. Rather than calling up Revision3 and saying "Hey guys, we found this back door on your site, we think pirates might be using it for their illegal downloading" they decided they'd just walk right in as well and start trying to catch those pirates with a large amount of fake torrents.

Whether this attack was intentional or not this attack doesn't matter. What does matter is that it brings something into the open which the pirate community has been claiming for a long time now: Media Defender will and has launched Denial of Service attacks at people it believes are pirates, something that is illegal in the United States. This is something they've been specifically hired to do by organizations like the RIAA and MPAA, as well as individual studios. This is a Wild West mentality where we are no longer innocent until proven guilty. This is people being deliberately attacked on a suspicion of illegal activity. This is an action that is counter to our nation's ideals of freedom, and if we could bring them to their knees before, we can kill them this time.