In a move meant to fight fire with fire, Sony recently launched a counterattack against the hackers that originally hacked them.
And Sony is doing that by hacking the hackers.
In an interesting twist to the ongoing saga that followed a hacking of Sony that released tons of personal information about its employees, as well as unreleased films, Sony is now launching DDoS attacks on websites that contain the leaked data by using Amazon Web Services.
Basically, Sony is now the hacker and is trying to take down websites that are offering the stolen content for download. A DDoS attack, or a distributed denial of service attack, basically happens when a hacker sends a flood of messages into a system, so much so that it shuts down, which denies service to that website's users.
Last month, Sony was victim to a major hack by a group referring to itself as the Guardians of Peace, who claimed the theft of nearly 100 terabytes of the company's financial information, emails and films. The group leaked much of that data to file-sharing websites, those that are now Sony's hacking targets.
This method of dealing with file sharing isn't necessarily new. Many early anti-piracy efforts employed this method by throwing up tons of fake files to keep users from downloading music and films.
However, DDoS attacks are technically illegal. Because of this, ExtremeTech suggests that Sony isn't doing standard DDoS attacks, but taking a different tactic.
"It is more likely that Sony is poisoning the BitTorrent swarms that are sharing the stolen data, making it very hard for people to download data - and if they do succeed in downloading, the poisoning should mean that the data is too corrupt to be of any use," writes the ExtremeTech website. "Sony is probably using a mix of interdiction - spamming peers with hundreds of servers, to prevent legitimate users from connecting to the peer to download the block of data - and index poisoning, which floods the swarm with lots of messages saying 'hey, we have the block you're looking for!' but then the block isn't there, or it has been intentionally corrupted."
Sony is possibly creating fake "seed" sources for sites hosting torrent files of the stolen documents. This means that anyone requesting that file through a peer-to-peer network won't get the documents, but the fake "seed" file instead.
The result, however, is the same: Sony is doing what it can to keep people from downloading the illegal files.
[Photo Credit: Ian Mutto/Flickr]
