The Memorial Day weekend will remain in the memory of Revision3, after the online media network experienced a denial of service attack that lasted from Saturday night until Tuesday.

Jim Louderback, chief executive of Revision3, said the attack was initiated by MediaDefender, a company that interferes with peer-to-peer sharing on behalf of entertainment companies.

Revision3 uses BitTorrent to distribute its content, such as the Internet shows Diggnation, Tekzilla or Totally Rad Show, and according to Louderback, his IT staff tracked the source of the attack to MediaDefender.

In his blog, Louderback explained that one of their servers was flooded by another device on the internet with an “overdose” of SYN packets, which caused it to shut down and drag all Revision3 with it. He also added that the SYN packets were directed to one particular port on one of their servers, which, coincidentally or not, was the one they use for their BitTorrent tracking server.

By tracking down the return addresses from the packets they received, Revision3 discovered that whoever was doing it was “not shy” and even more surprisingly, it wasn’t any underground criminal syndicate as they would have expected, but a public company called ArtistDirect, whose subsidiary is MediaDefender.

And this is when it all gets interesting: in a phone call with ArtistDirect interim CEO Dimitri Villard and MediaDefender Vice President of Operations Ben Grodsky, the two admitted to abusing Revision3’s network over a period of months, Louderback says.

MediaDefender exploited Revision3’s network for their personal profit, Louderback said, adding that although admitting to abusing their network, they claimed their servers only tried to contact Revision3’s only every three hours, which is not what the traffic log shows.

In term of financial losses, the Revision3 CEO said they suffered “measurable harm” following the attacks, but that they were unable to serve any video throughout the weekend.