Data Leaks Good For Something!

As you may already know, there are two types of hackers - the ones that do it for a good cause, and by that I mean disclosing vulnerabilities and reporting them to the ones that have them, and then there are the evil ones that hack for their own inscrutable purposes. Of course, data breaches are usually due to attacks from the second category. I would have never thought that anything good could come out of these activities, but it seems that I was wrong. Some hackers have intercepted e-mails - that's called a mail leak (which is just another type of data leakage). Now, the thing is that these e-mails contained some important info, which discloses a firm's controversial tactics!

The company I was talking about is MediaDefender. As you might have figured out from their name, these guys are fighting piracy, or, that's what they claim to be doing. According to The Wall Street Journal, the intercepted mails may lead us into thinking that MediaDefender may have been secretly behind MiiVii. In case you are wondering what this MiiVii is all about, well, it's a website that promised to allow people to download and upload copyrighted material. Now, please notice how many times I have used the word "may" - MediaDefender is not involved with these guys, but if it were, it would surely be embarrassing for it.

The e-mails also point out that the site is a gimmick and that MiiVii programs would actually track user activity and send a report back to MediaDefender, as I've read here. This case is foggy to say the least, but if the presumptions are true, then it means that such leaks are good for something; and secondly, that pirates are getting smarter and smarter, fact which can't be good for the industry.