In an attempt to disrupt the downloading of its embarrassingly large leak of data, Sony Pictures is taking inspiration from the hackers themselves to take down torrents.
Re/code reports that the company is using “hundreds of computers” to carry out denial of service attacks on the sites where its data is currently available. In fact, it’s using Amazon Web Services from data centres in Tokyo and Singapore to carry out the attack, according to sources.
The attacks have caused downloads to slow to a crawl. Using bogus seeds, the attacks sap the bandwidth available for the real files to be transferred over, making the process infuriatingly — perhaps impossibly — slow.
It’s not the first time Sony has used such tricks. In the past it has littered file sharing sites with decoy files labelled with names of its films — seeing downloaders open a completely empty file. It worked for a little while, and then file sharing got more advanced. Now, it’s clearly happy to just do whatever it can. [Re/code]