FBI Looking into Santa Monica Internet Company

Photo by JOHNNIE W@LKER via Flickr

The FBI is reportedly looking into a Santa Monica based internet company that crashed a San Francisco based internet television's network last weekend. MediaDefender, who is hired to prevent "alleged copyright infringement using peer-to-peer distribution" (think old-school Napster) performed a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) on Revision3.

“Media Defender was abusing one of Revision3’s servers for their own purposes – quite without our approval. When we closed off their backdoor access, MediaDefender’s servers freaked out, and went into attack mode – much like how a petulant toddler will throw an epic tantrum if you take away an ill-gotten Oreo," wrote Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3, in a blog post.

It is not known if MediaDefender did it on purpose, but such attacks are illegal in the United States. If Revision3 takes legal action, it won't be the first time Santa Monica company will have felt the heat. A few months ago, a "file sharing" community that points to unlicensed copies of copyrighted material fell victim to a MediaDefender attack. The Pirate Bay then sued the companies that hired MediaDefender. “They are going around accusing the pirate community for doing immoral stuff, when they do illegal stuff. We need to make a statement that just because something might be hard to fight it doesn’t mean that laws do not imply in the case,” said Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde.