Early last July, DailyTech
reported on
MiiVi.com, a website run by anti-piracy firm MediaDefender. According to ZeroPaid.com, MiiVi.com offered “fast
and easy video downloading,” and asked users to download a MiiVii client, which
purportedly scanned users’ hard drives for illegal content. The site’s true
ownership was betrayed by carelessly maintained DNS entries, which revealed
numerous contacts pointing to MediaDefender employees and their offices in
Santa Monica, California.
Shortly after the initial report, MediaDefender CEO
Randy Saaf wrote in to refute ZeroPaid’s,
calling the accusations a “complete
fabrication.” Unfortunately, when pressed for additional comment –
particularly regarding the suspicious nature of the company’s DNS changes –
Saaf offered no response.
MediaDefender returned to the spotlight again last Saturday,
when a group, calling themselves the “MediaDefender-Defenders” (MDD) leaked almost
700 megabytes of internal e-mail onto the Internet. The leak appears to
chronicle the communications of several MediDefender employees, with dates stretching
from March 28, 2007 to September 10, 2007.
The leak targetted
at the company’s interdiction efforts. “By releasing these emails we hope to
secure the privacy and personal integrity of all peer-to-peer users. The emails
contains information about the various tactics and technical solutions for
tracking p2p users, and disrupt p2p services,” reads the accompanying NFO file –
the group behind the leak seems to have spared nothing. Topics run the gamut
from internal minutia: meetings, employee evaluations, and sick leave; to privileged discussion on the nature and performance of
MediaDefender’s P2P interdiction and monitoring efforts.
One full day after the email leak, MDD struck again and released
a 25-minute voice-over-IP phone call between MediaDefender and the New York State General
Attorney. “MediaDefender thinks they've shut out their internals from us. Thats
[sic] what they think,” reads the phone leak’s requisite, accompanying NFO
file. More importantly, MDD has signaled that more is on the way and will be
released “when time is ready.”
The authenticity of the email or VOIP has not be confirmed by MediaDefender.
On the same day as the phone leak, reports surfaced of a
database dump of MediaDefender’s tracking network also appeared on BitTorrent. However,
at this time DailyTech has not been
able to verify the authenticity of these claims.