Ex-employee brings down several Bittorrent trackers
 

Saw dis on line today in me newstracker:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...rrent-trackers

Ex-employee brings down several Bittorrent trackers

Flicks the switch on way out
By Lawrence Latif
Mon Oct 18 2010, 14:14
A DISGRUNTLED FORMER EMPLOYEE has done what the big media mafiaa have failed to do by shuttering several Bittorrent tracker websites.
While the various music recording label and Hollywood movie representatives have spent millions on hiring lawyers and lobbying politicians to take down what they call "the pirates", the actions of a former employee at the web host Reality Check Network have seemingly done far more damage. The outfit hosts numerous Bittorrent tracker websites on its servers and at 11AM BST it suffered what it called a "malicious attack" on its network.
Later the firm said that it wasn't a "network based" attack but rather an old school instance of sabotage by corrupting the master boot records (MBR) of servers, conducted by a ex-employee who had "intimate knowledge" of the network and systems.
Essentially the MBR holds information about where the operating system resides and is read after the system completes BIOS execution at start-up. A corrupted MBR typically doesn't result in a loss of data, however repairing it is a fiddly and time consuming task.
At press time, Reality Check Network's website is still down.
The attack goes to illustrate, once again, the while the Bittorrent protocol might be decentralised, the job of serving up torrent pointers is still very much a centralised operation. While outfits like The Pirate Bay can afford to have redundancy in place, even it has been forced offline, albeit for minutes, from attacks by 'anti-piracy' groups. Smaller torrent trackers such as those hosted on the Reality Check Network are often much smaller operations without the contingency in place to withstand attacks.
Who knows, maybe the big media mafiaa will extend an offer of employment to this disgruntled ex-employee. After all the chap managed to succeed where it has failed miserably, though only because he was an insider. µ

Wow, that's crazy

I mean .. a ddos attack is only a temporary problem. Its like putting a kid in time out

welcome to last week LOL

You do realize that this is a bit more than a DDoS attack right?

such a dumb article

Although it's a temporary fix, it's still pretty major. Seems like the best bet for these big media companies need to do is to send some moles and infiltrate the torrent sites from within.

Suppose i should of read the *whole* thing...busted.

Take a time out yourself and read what he wrote and you might see that your reply has
nothing at all to do with this thread.

:2 cents:

It's happening...

i hope this will be a lesson to all host companies out there. because i dont understand how the fuck this happened to a company that was suposed to be one of the most reliable. i am still shocked here and wonder what to do next. i mean, how the fuck you dont change all the passwords when an employee leaves the boat. how? can anyone explain this?

Who the fuck is reality check networks and why should we care.

More likely he did it before officially leaving, or he had prepared ahead of time with some unknown access he set up..

A MBR can be fixed. He should have deleted everything.

Time to get a reality check.

yeah, I'd be thinking that's more mischief than anything he could be really sued for.

Exactly what I was going to write. Bribing some employees might be cheaper and more effective.

So they also host several bittorrent trackers? Interesting.