Slashdot Mirror
Leaks Prove MediaDefender's Deception
Who will defend the defenders? writes "Ars Technica has posted the first installment in their analysis of the leaked MediaDefender emails and found some very interesting things. Apparently, the New York Attorney General's office is working on a big anti-piracy sting and they were working on finding viable targets. It also discusses how some of the emails show MediaDefender trying to spy on their competitors, sanitize their own Wikipedia entry, deal with the hackers targeting their systems, and to quash the MiiVi story even while they were rebuilding it as Viide. Oh yes, they definitely read "techie, geek web sites where everybody already hates us" like Slashdot, too."
You know, I hope people keep this incident in mind if they are considering going to work for a disreputable company, a company whose primary missions is screwing people, especially when those people that are being screwed have a Robin Hood-like reputation and are a lot smarter than you. The sad fact is that there will undoubtedly be a lot of collateral damage due to this episode. As pointed out in the Ars Technica article, a secretary who happened to be working for MediaDefender whose worst crime was answering phones and getting coffee for his or her bosses now has the social security number, home address and phone number, and salary information out there for everyone to download and look at.
I think that an even worse fallout of all this is that companies are going to be even more anal about stuff like e-mail policies and such. At my company now, they content-block us from accessing Gmail. I'll be that companies will start doing crap like blocking employees from even sending e-mail to Gmail now, the attack vector that allowed these e-mails to get leaked.
But still, even after having said all that, I love it when an evil company doing evil things gets their due like this. It's entirely possible that MediaDefender might go out of business because of this. If you're one of their customers whose detailed contract information got leaked, how likely are you to do business with them again? Although it occurred in a totally scummy way that I just can't endorse, I can't deny the end result of big media companies being a little more skittish to hiring these outfits to do their dirty work is a Good Thing.
I think this revelation brings to light the extent to which companies will go - to deceive the public, the mainstream media... and then continue with their illegal practices after a short time.
Microsoft's recent downplaying of the unexplained Windows Updates is another case in point. Where is Mark Russinovich's article that does a 'diff' of the replaced files, and explaining the 'new behaviour' in detail - like he did in the Sony rootkit case?
It is a bit sad that many of these incidents do not figure in the mainstream media - which seems to be in the powerful grips of these Corporate thugs.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Now don't get me wrong. I'm neither squeamish, nor easily offended. But in professional, corporate email communications such a tone has about as much justification as surfing porn at work.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
there are more leaks!
MediaDefender Phone Call and Gnutella Tracking Database Leaked
Some smart yet misguided people have their plot foiled by the weakest link, the human. I'm glad this whole miivi thing has been exposed. I think how it has been brought to light serves as a good reminder to the rest of us. No matter how secure your app, or how great your plan, all it takes is one person who doesn't understand policy or the consequences of following it and all is lost. Cheers
I know it's pointless to ask things like this of the /. "editors", but the summary of this story is almost completely useless to anyone who is coming to the story cold (like me).
Would it have killed someone to have rewritten the submission so that it explained:
?
I can go Google all that stuff and find out for myself, but why would I bother, if it's not clear to me why the story is important in the first place?
Read my blog.
Of course, in a country with a sensible data protection regime, forwarding personally identifiable information to a weakly-protected gmail account would be a non-no in and of itself, One of the problems with the US's absolute lack of constraints on companies' use of personal data is that the casual mailing of SSNs can go on, and management have no reason to deal with it. In europe, that sort of stuff is locked down into HR department systems.
In case someone wants to have a look, Here is a on-line mailbox with all the leaked emails
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Legally, the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine applies only when there's some sort of causative link between the illegal discovery of something and the investigation into it. E.g., if a police officer breaks into your house without cause and finds your coke-cutting equipment, you're probably safe. But if your house gets broken into by a(nother) criminal while you're away, and in the course of the ensuing investigation the police find your stash ... tough luck. That's pretty much how I see this situation. The fact that the information came out because some guy's GMail got hacked pales in significance compared to the content that was disclosed, and I don't see any reason to cover my eyes just because of the source, when the source was just due to chance (or, perhaps, some sort of karma/fate/God).
Morally, these scumbags gave up any claim to anything a long time ago. Morally, they all deserve to be soundly beaten and left for dead on some island somewhere so they can learn to play nice with each other or starve. Because that's sadly illegal, pointing and laughing at their misfortune is a close second.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
MiiVi would be such a cool name for a text editor. Especially if it ran on Nintendo consoles.
sig?
Oh yes, they definitely read "techie, geek web sites where everybody already hates us" like Slashdot, too."
Duh, most of us that are here too much can pick out those shills. They are very obvious to anyone paying attention. I believe there is a website out there that tracks them and even links accounts on different sites to specific people at Idiot-defender.
What they do is ineffective except for catching the 13 year old girls that dont know anything. they dont even put a mild dent in the real sharing groups. One of the guys at work was running around with a new DL DVD he got in the mail from a group member full of zero day songs and even stuff that has not been released yet all at incredibly high bitrate. He also had a copy of the Simpsons movie in 1080i which was mind blowing, it had to be a digital conversion from a not released yet BluRay master or someone broke the digital cinema format to convert it in a theater projection booth with a laptop.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I don't see any mention in the article of even an attempt to get the NY AG's office to comment on this story. Nor do I see any mention of it on the AG's own web site. If ars were a newspaper, the editors wouldn't have let this story appear at all without at least an official "no comment" by the Attorney General's office.
A quick search this am for "new york attorney general mediadefender" turned up no mainstream press reports about this story.
According the ars piece, by the way, the AG's office appeared to be interested in porn downloads, not, as the editors here put it, "working on a big anti-piracy sting and they were working on finding viable targets." From TFA, "Although the full scope of the project cannot be extrapolated from the e-mails, the information available indicates that MediaDefender intends to provide the Attorney General's office with information about users accessing pornographic content. Other kinds of information could be involved as well." (That last sentence is so vague and general that it could refer to almost any information of any kind anywhere on the planet.)
Don't the editors at least read the stories themselves before they post them to Slashdot?
None of these comments is a defense of either MediaDefender or the NYAG. I'm more concerned about the shoddy reporting that passes for journalism on geek news sites like this one and arstechnica. Particularly the latter, since the articles I've read there in the past gave off the semblance of decent journalism.
Following the Nintendo pronunciation of Wii (as Wee), would this not be sound like ViiDi would be pronounced "Vee Die" I'd check to see if they are scandinavian and suicidal.
The WSJ got a 'no comment' from the NY AG ( http://www.moneyweb.co.za/mw/view/mw/en/page94?oid=161203&sn=Detail ). The AG's case was definitely related to child porn; not piracy.
From TFA:
"When Douglas pointed out that information about MiiVi had been added to the MediaDefender Wikipedia page, Saaf decided that he wanted it taken down. "Can you please do what you can to eliminate the entry? Let me know if you have any success," Saaf wrote. "I will attempt to get all references to miivi removed from wiki," developer Ben Ebert replied. "We'll see if I can get rid of it.""
They wanted to remove all links between themselves and Miivi. When there definately was a link. They knew it was true, they just didn't want anyone else to know about it.
That's not the intended use of the tool that is Wikipedia.
I know it's pointless to ask things like this of the /. "editors", but the summary of this story is almost completely useless to anyone who is coming to the story cold (like me).
Related Stories[+] Your Rights Online: MediaDefender Denies Entrapment Accusations 104 comments
Ortega-Starfire writes "We've previously discussed the subject of MediaDefender setting up a site to catch movie pirates. Ars Technica covers the response from MediaDefender, which basically states the entire thing was a mistake and was only an internal site they forgot to password protect, and that they were not using this with the MPAA. The article asks: 'If this is true, why did MediaDefender immediately remove all contact information from the whois registry for the domain? Saaf said that after everything hit the fan, the company decided to take everything on the site down because it was afraid of a hacker attack or "people sending us spam." Yes, spam. The MPAA's Elizabeth Kaltman also chimed in to say that they had no involvement with MiiVi: "The MediaDefender story is false. We have no relationship with that company at all," she told Ars.'"
[-] IT: Internal Emails of An RIAA Attack Dog Leaked 412 comments
qubezz writes "The company MediaDefender works with the RIAA and MPAA against piracy, setting up fake torrents and trackers and disrupting p2p traffic. Previously, the TorrentFreak site accused them of setting up a fake internet video download site designed to catch and bust users. MediaDefender denied the entrapment charges. Now 700MB of MediaDefender's internal emails from the last 6 months have been leaked onto BitTorrent trackers. The emails detail their entire plan, including how they intended to distance themselves from the fake company they set up and future strategies. Other pieces of company information were included in the emails such as logins and passwords, wage negotiations, and numerous other aspect of their internal business."
You can't take the sky from me...
Wikipedia is clear that it is AGAINST policy to self-edit. Read the Code of Conduct.
Just because they don't have a very effective police force preventing rude, deceptive bullcrap does mpt mean it is acceptable behavior.
And YES, changing what OTHER people wrote about you without admitting who you are IS an indication of guilt. When I defend myself from something I do NOT do it anonymously.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Heh, they all but went out of their way to provide access to the hackers. The top brass had his emails being forwarded to his Gmail account, bypassing any and all security they had set up on the corporate network.
Then the hackers got the usernames and passwords and gained internal access to the network, establishing admin access on the domain. They apparently set up packet captures, or if MediaDefender were the ones capturing packets, they found them and this is where they captured the VoIP calls.
"Keyloggers, we don't need no stinking keyloggers!"
The worst infections to get rid of are those who have admin access to the network and who maintain their access using normal everyday network admin utilities (From my experience, the French are especially good at this). I have worked with sites that have been hacked where the intruders have obtained an administrator level password, then gone in and set up RPC over HTTPS on the domain servers, then the hackers have set up their own 2003 server, added it to the domain, promoted it to domain controller and had the hacked company's Domain Controller perform an outbound sync (using the RPC over HTTPS) to the hackers 2003 server. Any password changes the users make on the home network will be replicated to their off site "guest host" malicious server.
The hackers later added Distributed File Shares or DFS, and used it to replicate file shares (i.e. user folders) information to their hacked domain controller. The hackers basically set themselves up as a run-of-the-mill remote office that synchronizes over a low-speed wan link.
This company was totally Pwn3d... I wouldn't be surprised to see the same thing happened here with the amount of information they collected.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
...he/she would be protected under the laws we have regarding whistleblowing. Wait, how? IANAL (ever), but according to Wikipedia, the legal protections for whistleblowers appear to extend only to employees. My admittedly limited understanding is that MediaDefender-Defender was not an employee or group of employees but someone who claims to have 'infiltrated' the Gmail account in question. I'm not at all sure how that qualifies for whistleblower protection.Even if we all want to cheer MD-D, it remains that what they did was very likely a violation of a number of user policy agreements (Gmail, their ISP, etc.) and possibly illegal. Let's not start adorning them with medals yet.
So you can laugh all you want to...