MediaDefender is a company that provides services for large media companies in an effort to stifle peer-to-peer and BitTorrent transfers. The main method used by MediaDefender is to flood the network with fake files of the alleged copyrighted work making a downloaded version worthless to the downloadee as well as wasting their time and bandwidth.

In February, MediaDefender launched a fake video sharing site called Miivi.com. The site was created solely to trap users who uploaded copyrighted material of MediaDefenders clients. Once the news leaked of MediaDefenders honeypot project, Miivi.com was shut down and displays a placeholder page to this day.

On September 14th, internal e-mails of the company were leaked onto BitTorrent by a group called MediaDefender Defenders. The e-mails include various FTP and database logins as well as 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, and information on their monitoring of competitors. There was even reaction to TorrentFreak breaking the news about MiiVi.

From: Ben Grodsky
Sent: Tue 03-Jul-07 20:19
To: MIIVI; Randy Saaf; Octavio Herrera; Steve Lyons
Subject: MiiVi got Dugg

Looks like the domain transfer has screwed us over:
http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-gang-launches-their-own
-video-download-site-to-trap-people/
http://digg.com/users/AcePup/news/dugg

-Ben

This is really fucked.
Let’s pull miivi offline.

The 700Mb worth of e-mails were acquired by guessing the password to a Gmail account used as a backup for the company e-mails.

With MediaDefender’s internal e-mails spread out all over the Internet, groups of peer-to-peer loyalists poured over every detail. With various servers exposed MediaDefender Defenders managed to leak the source code of the anti-piracy tool used by MediaDefender to spread their fake files across many peer-to-peer networks. This is a huge blow to the company’s efforts to protect the intellectual property of large media companies as p2p hosts can fortify their systems against floods of fake media and torrent files.

This is a firm warning to any other p2p media protection companies. If you mess with the technologically savy peer to peer groups be prepared for some harsh retaliation. I still believe that there is no effective way to fight piracy on the Internet once it is leaked. Fighting the pirates will only make them multiply and mock you like the Pirate Bay is doing tight now.