Rumors have long swirled in online forums about what sort of tricks MediaDefender, the company hired by movie studios and record labels to flood file-sharing networks with fake files, was up to, but now the tables have been turned.
A group of crackers calling themselves the “MediaDefender-Defenders” cracked a MediaDefender employee's GMail account and have posted more 6,000 messages said to be from MediaDefender.
The group says that “by releasing these e-mails we hope to secure the privacy and personal integrity of all peer-to-peer users.”
Naturally the e-mails have already spread far and wide via a file on bittorrent, but they've also been converted to HTML and published on the web (a site we don't expect to be up for too long).
The most interesting info from the e-mails is that the paranoids posting rumors about a planned site to trick the file-sharing community, were not, as it turns out, just paranoid rumors. The e-mails reveal that the company executives discussed building a site, WiiVii.com, that would pose as a pirate haven and offer bittorrent files. While it would have been designed to seem like the next Pirate Bay, the site would actually track users and report their IP addresses back to MediaDefender.
ComputerWorld reports that at least one e-mail “seemed to discuss software that, once downloaded to the PCs of WiiVii's visitors, would also transform the computers into bots capable of automatically seeding peer-to-peer networks with fake files.”
The site containing the stolen e-mails has posted an e-mail purportedly from MediaDefender CEO Randy Saaf, which reads:
Somehow we suspect it was.
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