The Pirates
Can't Be Stopped
Condé Nast Portfolio
February 2008 issue
By Daniel Roth
From: Ty Heath [MediaDefender]
Sent: Wednesday, June 6, 2007 7:02 p.m.
To: it <it@mediadefender.com>
Subject: pm webserver
The 65.120.42.146 pm webserver has been compromised […]
As a side note, please do not ever use the old passwords on anything.
The
first time Ethan broke into MediaDefender, he had no idea what he had
found. It was his Christmas break, and the high schooler was hunkered
down in the basement office of his family's suburban home. The place
was, as usual, a mess. Papers and electrical cords covered the floor
and crowded the desk near his father's Macs and his own five-year-old
Hewlett-Packard desktop. While his family slept, Ethan would take over
the office, and soon enough he'd start taking over the computer
networks of companies around the world. Exploiting a weakness in
MediaDefender's firewall, he started poking around on the company's
servers. He found folder after folder labeled with the names of some of
the largest media companies on the planet: News Corp., Time Warner, Universal.
Since 2000, MediaDefender has served as the online guard dog of the
entertainment world, protecting it against internet piracy. When Transformers
was about to hit theaters in summer 2007, Paramount turned to the
company to stop the film's spread online. Island Records counted on
MediaDefender to protect Amy Winehouse's Back to Black album, as did NBC with 30 Rock. Activision asked MediaDefender to safeguard games like Guitar Hero; Sony its music and films; and World Wrestling Entertainment, its pay-per-view steel-cage championships and pudding-wrestling matches.
