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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: 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.