It is a bizarre technology environment we live in when this is a crime:

A 21-year-old Northern California man agreed to a two-year prison deal Tuesday after pleading guilty to charges of unleashing distributed-denial-of-service attacks against two web sites.

Gregory King, known as Silenz, Silenz420, sZ, GregK, and Gregk707, admitted in U.S. District Court in Sacramento that he controlled about 7,000 bots and used them to attack sites Killanet and Castlecops. [Wired]

But this isn’t….?

When MediaDefender rained down an attack of some 8,000 SYN packets a second on an open BitTorrent tracker that pointed the way to hundreds of thousands of copyrighted movies for the taking, it had no idea it was shuttering a legitimate San Francisco media company.

What does it matter whether they were shuttering a legitimate company or not?  Their actions are illegal, period.  If MediaDefender was concerned about the tracker pointing to copyrighted content, it is their responsibility to inform the authorities, not take matter into their own hands by engaging in ILLEGAL DDOS attacks.

It’s an open debate whether MediaDefender’s actions were lawful, even when it targets illicit torrent-tracking sites pointing the way to unauthorized, copyrighted material. The FBI is examining the Revision3 affair.

One bureau source told Threat Level that it was a “gray” area in federal computer security law.

Then there’s the area of corporate responsibility. Louderback said in an interview that Revision3 closed the hole in its tracker over the Memorial Day weekend and subsequently got slammed by MediaDefender. [Wired]

There is no “gray area” here.  If DDOS is illegal, it is illegal for everyone equally.  The FBI needs to do the right thing here and take these guys to court and shut down their illegal hacker venture that is wasting Internet bandwidth and engaging in attacks against the innocent.  If they believe someone is a guilty party, they are not entitled to shut them down, they are entitled to address it within the existing legal system.  They are not above the law.

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