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Costly Hack Amounts to $825K. Pirate Bay's Secret Source?


A hacker group called Mediadefender-Defenders has caused quite a ruckus for the actual Mediadefender anti-piracy group, which provides anti-piracy tools. A hack that found its way to a Mediadefender employee's Gmail account among other things cost the company at least $825,000. That's a hefty price to pay, and effectively wiped out Mediadefender's parent company's profits for Q3. An SEC filing shows that the hack group in fact got a hold of a vast email archive from September, containing nine months of internal correspondence.

Due to the severity of this hack, the email correspondence in particular included customer data, pricing and other sensitive information, the high price of fixing this major hiccup ended up amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. It has also been reported that this sensitive information also involved passwords granting access to various servers.

pirate-bay-l.pngThis whole fiasco seems strangely related to the Pirate Bay situation, in which emails leaked from Mediadefender-defenders provided the P2P company with the evidence it needed to initiate a legal stance against content providers. These leaked emails indicate that networks such as NBC Universal have been taking underhanded measures to prevent the P2P network from operating properly. While this isn't the same net neutrality issue for which Comcast has gotten itself into hot water, it does speak to a level of institutionalized prevention measures that are being taken against file-sharing networks.

[via p2p blog]

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