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Lily Hay Newman reports at Slate that Sony is counter-hacking to keep its leaked files from spreading across torrent sites. According to Recode, Sony is using hundreds of computers in Asia to execute a denial of service attack on sites where its pilfered data is available, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. Sony used a similar approach in the early 2000s working with an anti-piracy firm called MediaDefender, when illegal file sharing exploded. The firm populated file-sharing networks with decoy files labelled with the names of such popular movies as “Spider-Man,” to entice users to spend hours downloading an empty file. "Using counter-attacks to contain leaks and deal with malicious hackers has been gaining legitimacy," writes Newman. "Some cyber-security experts even feel that the Second Amendment can be interpreted as applying to 'cyber arms'.”
[Ed's Comment: As I understand it, the Second Amendment only applies in the United States or in its territories overseas — it doesn't give Americans the right to bear arms anywhere else in the world.]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 12 2014, @03:23PM
I've been reading about this and they are not doing a "denial of service" attack. All they are doing is running bittorrent peers that serve corrupt data when asked. It is a really big stretch to say that responding to someone else's request with a bogus response qualifies as denial of service - nobody made them come to you with their hand out in the first place.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Friday December 12 2014, @03:36PM
If Microsoft someone was doing that to torrents of Linux distros there might be legal consequences. It's certainly attempting to disrupt services.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 12 2014, @04:01PM
> there might be legal consequences.
Sure there might be, it would probably be tortious interference. But you can't have a contract for something that is illegal so not applicable here and still not denial of service anyway.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Saturday December 13 2014, @05:37AM
If Microsoft someone was doing that to torrents of Linux distros there might be legal consequences. It's certainly attempting to disrupt services.
Given that Microsoft does not own Linux it wouldn't be particularly relevant to this conversation.
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(Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Friday December 12 2014, @09:21PM
I've been reading about this and they are not doing a "denial of service" attack. All they are doing is running bittorrent peers that serve corrupt data when asked. It is a really big stretch to say that responding to someone else's request with a bogus response qualifies as denial of service - nobody made them come to you with their hand out in the first place.
You're right, it isn't a DOS attack. So what sort of attack is it? It seems conceptually similar to DNS spoofing, but of course it doesn't involve DNS.