Flash Media Servers as Open Proxies

Marshall Eubanks tme at americafree.tv
Thu Dec 3 17:45:54 UTC 2009


I recently found out that the Adobe Flash Media Server (FMS) can  
operate "out of the box"
as an open proxy, enabling other people to steal server resources and  
bandwidth. Furthermore,
I also found that there is an ecosystem of pirates taking advantage of  
this "feature" to
illegally stream sports events (and maybe other stuff as well). Each  
event uses multiple (stolen)
servers and can amount to thousands of streams and Gbps of consumed  
bandwidth.

I believe but am not 100% sure that there are similar problems with  
Window Media Servers.

I would like to hear (off-list) from people who have experience  
fighting this so that we could
maybe pool techniques. I will try to write this up further later.

Regards
Marshall Eubanks




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