Johnny Casey

Torrent Freak caused a stir when they announced that a group called Media Defender-Defenders had released pilfered emails from Media Defender.

Unfortunately for Media Defender – a company dedicated to mitigating the effects of internet leaks – they can do nothing about being the subject of the biggest BitTorrent leak of all time. Over 700mb of their own internal emails, dating back over 6 months have been leaked to the internet in what will be a devastating blow to the company.

Irony, not withstanding, bittorrent users engage in the very tit-for-tat that makes collaborative efforts worthwhile. In this case, bittorrent users identified a cheater that engaged tactics to impede exchanges (albeit illegal exchanges) and reacted by outting the cheater.

Particularly interesting in the comments are the extracted lists of IP addresses. Once these are available, everyone will effectively killfile anyone connecting from those addresses.

The bittorrent community, acting as a smart mob attacked the reputation of Media Defender.

However, one must consider how the information was acquired and the total content. Others have mentioned that SSN were amongst the data acquired and wondered whether they will become pariahs. Also interesting is how someone knew to attack the GMail account which held the files in the first place.