Demonoid Busted As A Gift To The United States Government
by enigmax
The nightmare week for Demonoid has just reached a huge crescendo, with news coming out of Ukraine that following a massive DDoS attack the site has now been busted by local authorities. Those looking for a U.S. connection to the raid won’t be disappointed – a source in the country’s Interior Ministry says that the action was scheduled to coincide with Deputy Prime Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky’s trip to the United States.
Last week thousands of Demonoid users feared the worst when their beloved site disappeared from the Internet. Many thought that the site had been busted, but were eventually relieved to hear that it was ‘only’ a massive DDoS attack.
But today the roller-coaster ride plummeted to new depths, with confirmation coming out of Ukraine that the DDoS was just the beginning – the site has been busted by the authorities.
ColoCall is the largest datacenter in Ukraine and a place that has been Demonoid’s home in recent years. But in the middle of last week, in the wake of the DDoS attack, government investigators arrived at ColoCall to shut Demonoid down.
“Investigators have copied all the information from the servers Demonoid and sealed them,” an anonymous ColoCall source confirmed. “Some equipment was not seized, but now it does not work, and we were forced to terminate the agreement with the site.”
As reported on TorrentFreak following our discussions with Demonoid’s admin last week, there were suspicions that the site may have been subjected to some kind of exploit or hack in addition to the DDoS. That version of events is now confirmed by the ColoCall source.
“Shortly after [the DDoS] a hacker break-in occurred, and a few days later came the investigators,” the source added.
But aside from the busting of the site, which is the biggest BitTorrent-related raid in recent memory and one that has taken out the world’s largest torrent site/tracker combo, there is a rather large international sting in the tail.
Despite general opinion that Demonoid did not contravene Ukranian law, especially since it blocked all Ukranian IP addresses to avoid upsetting the locals, the site still attracted the attention of the authorities there. That, according to a source in the country’s government, is all down to the United States getting involved.
A source inside the Interior Ministry has informed Kommersant that the raid on Demonoid was timed to coincide with the very first trip of Deputy Prime Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky‘s trip to the United States. On the agenda: copyright infringement.
Ukraine had promised the United States that it would improve its attitude and efforts towards enforcing copyright and no doubt its Western partner will be very pleased indeed that Demonoid’s head has been presented on a platter.
But while Demonoid’s servers are in custody, the site’s admin does not appear to be. The ColoCall source would not say who is behind the site, only that its management is located in Mexico. The devil may yet be back….
Now personally, it's been many a year since I torrented. After it became evident that torrenting was not very secure with man-in-middle harvesting of IPs, I left it. Never was one for public trackers though. Still some think that's the way to file share. The funny thing is, both torrenting and file sharing through cyberlockers is a way to get files around among those that do. In both methods, it seems the groups are almost reluctant to try the other. If they do, they go back to the one they prefer.
So maybe I'm an odd ball in this as it seemed to me that file sharing was more secure through the cyberlockers than with torrenting and I jumped ship. Never went back to torrenting afterwards. This particular tracker, while famous is one I've never been to. I think once or twice back before the bust of The Pirate Bay, I went there to read original responces written by Sunday to the various take-down requests made to them. But again, didn't look for any files there.
More so today, if you must torrent, find a private tracker. They're a bit harder to do man-in-middle IP harvesting.
Again, it can be believed that lots of diplomatic pressure has been put on the Ukraine to kill off this tracker. Most of these have later been revealed to be exactly that. Some, such as the bust of The Pirate Bay, really stink as to the set up of how they were dealt with.