Demonoid Busted As A Gift To The United States Government (UPdated)

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from TorrentFreak.................... 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….

TorrentFreak contacted the Demonoid admin for a comment but we have yet to hear back.

Demonoid Operators Face Criminal Investigation in Mexico

BBC News Link

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from arstechnica.com ........... All 3 have been the target of crippling attacks carried out over the past week.

What do WikiLeaks, Demonoid, and security website KrebsOnSecurity have in common? They've all been the target of crippling denial-of-service attacks carried out over the past two weeks by faceless enemies determined to punish the sites for viewpoints or services they find objectionable.

Radical transparency website WikiLeaks is going into its sixth day of being largely unreachable , thanks to a torrent of junk traffic that makes it impossible for supporters to access the site. It's no modest achievement, since the outage extends to most of WikiLeaks's mirror sites and at times to Defense Fund Net Neutrality , the French non-profit agency that serves as one of the sole ways for supporters to fund the whistleblower site.

Life hasn't been easy for security journalist Brian Krebs, either. In recent days, his site has also buckled under the weight of a series of Web attacks . One of them comes in the form of a large number of computers bombarding his servers with multiple requests per second to load the same story. Other attacks relied on a technique known as DNS reflection , in which miscreants use misconfigured domain name system servers to flood a target with IP address lookups. The method is popular with attackers because a single spoofed request to a DNS server can increase the amount of data at the targeted website 70-fold.

Demonoid, one of the Internet's oldest BitTorrent tracker services, was also reportedly knocked completely offline late last month. It hasn't been seen since, although it's unclear if that's because of a raid on its Ukraine-based webhost or a continuing assault of garbage traffic.

The high-profile outages come as DoS attacks have surged 82 percent since June 2011, according to a recent report by Arbor Networks. Such assaults are among the crudest, since they require little skill and are carried out under the cover of darkness. With the wide availability of DIY DoS kits and their success of publicly punishing adversaries, they aren't likely to subside anytime soon.