Hackers leak emails...Nahhh, not hackers...

September 2007

Hackers leak antipiracy vendor's e-mails to Net. Thousands of e-mails detailing the operations of MediaDefender Inc., a company hired by movie studios and record labels to flood file-sharing networks with fake files of pirated films and albums, have leaked to the Internet. A group calling itself “MediaDefender-Defenders” claimed responsibility for posting more 6,000 messages purportedly from MediaDefender. “By releasing these e-mails we hope to secure the privacy and personal integrity of all peer-to-peer users," MediaDefender-Defenders said in a text file bundled with the compressed messages. “The e-mails contains [sic] information about the various tactics and technical solutions for tracking p2p users, and disrupt [sic] p2p services.” The group said it hacked the Gmail account of a MediaDefender employee who had forwarded his work mail to his personal Google email service address. A file containing the e-mail messages quickly spread via BitTorrent, and its contents have also been extracted and converted into HTML, then published on at least one Web site. In the e-mails, which covered a period from mid-December 2006 to September. 10, company executives discussed a planned Web site, dubbed WiiVii.com that would pose as a pirate site that offered downloads of copyrighted movies and music but would actually track users who accessed it, then report their IP addresses back to MediaDefender.