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It's been a pretty horrible couple of weeks for popular private BitTorrent tracker, Demonoid, but after the news that Demonoid servers have now been seized by Ukrainian authorities, users of the website are now fretting about their details getting into the wrong hands.
The website was first attacked via a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack last week, which successfully took down the website and the tracker. A hacker break-in also occurred at around the same time. "I’ll fix the site as soon as possible, but it might be a while this time," was one of the last messages the admin of the site posted. A statement that has since turned out to be far too optimistic, as things were about to turn even more nasty for the website.
Within days, Ukrainian police stormed the datacenter of ColoCall, Ukraine's largest datacenter and home to Demonoid's servers, and made copies of all of Demonoid's data, as well as taking the servers fully offline. The surprise raid may have been politically motivated according to TorrentFreak, as a "gift" to the United States ahead of Deputy Prime Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky's trip over there to discuss, among other topics, copyright infringement policing.
With authorities in control of the usage data of thousands of Demonoid's users, many of whom chose to join the by-invitations website to protect their privacy, the worry is now that authorities will use or share the data to come after these users. It is unknown at this point whether private data seized were encrypted, but history suggest that investigations or lawsuits against users of BitTorrent websites are unlikely.
The website was first attacked via a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack last week, which successfully took down the website and the tracker. A hacker break-in also occurred at around the same time. "I’ll fix the site as soon as possible, but it might be a while this time," was one of the last messages the admin of the site posted. A statement that has since turned out to be far too optimistic, as things were about to turn even more nasty for the website.
Within days, Ukrainian police stormed the datacenter of ColoCall, Ukraine's largest datacenter and home to Demonoid's servers, and made copies of all of Demonoid's data, as well as taking the servers fully offline. The surprise raid may have been politically motivated according to TorrentFreak, as a "gift" to the United States ahead of Deputy Prime Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky's trip over there to discuss, among other topics, copyright infringement policing.
With authorities in control of the usage data of thousands of Demonoid's users, many of whom chose to join the by-invitations website to protect their privacy, the worry is now that authorities will use or share the data to come after these users. It is unknown at this point whether private data seized were encrypted, but history suggest that investigations or lawsuits against users of BitTorrent websites are unlikely.