RIAA taking it up the ass lately.

Sorry, but I really couldn’t find a nicer way to put what has been happening with the RIAA. Actually, with the RIAA’s hollow, draconian “triumph” over a minority single mother, sodomy against the industry monster would be hysterical. And over the weekend, the RIAA got some much needed sodomisation. Jihen posted a link to a TorrentFreak story about hackers briefly taking out the RIAA’s website.

The Story of the Hack. The TorrentFreak post:

It started out on the social news website Reddit, where a link to a really slow SQL query was posted. While the Reddit users were trying to kill the RIAA server, someone allegedly decided to up the ante and wipe the site’s entire database.

The comments on Reddit are only speculation so far. Based on the username, which was apparently “webReadOnly”, it might not have been setup correctly, or someone could have found another way to delete the content form the site.

Another possibility is that the website has some sort of database flood protection that disables new connections, or perhaps the RIAA themselves removed the content temporarily. The latter seems unlikely, as a better solution would be to take it entirely offline to fix the bigger problem. While they could fix a small vulnerability like this in a matter of seconds, the chances are it’s not an isolated problem.

As pointed out by Haywire, playing around with the urls a bit can return some funny results. It is pretty easy to make the RIAA link to The Pirate Bay for example.

The Beginning of The End. The hack is just the latest of problems to beset the RIAA, starting with RIAA allies MediaDefender being hacked last summer and their internal memos being made available via torrent. (Transmitting ACK to kenryoku_one for that link). They scored a hollow victory over a minority single mother, then threatened to go after people who rip their CDs to their computers. Their tactics backfired, as music companies started offering downloadable music without DRM. Now, word that EMI will withdraw support of the RIAA unless the industry gestapo changes its ways.

RIP RIAA. 2008 could very well see the death of the RIAA, especially if EMI does pull its support out from under the organization’s feet. Then again, the RIAA could just be hacked to tiny, bite-sized pieces at the rate the attacks have been coming. Hopefully, the RIAA will wise up and see that they’re not winning any friends with their lawsuits. If not, there’s plenty more hacks where the SQL query came from.

And if someone did manage to wipe the database, do make certain that next time it’s a permanent wipe. K?