World’s top #3 torrent site, ExtraTorrent ( aka ET ) has suffered a major DDoS attack over the past holiday weekend. The problem appears to be related to the site’s recent ban of ‘unofficial’ proxy services.
“While many people were celebrating Christmas, the site’s operators were busy keeping the site online, after it was pounded by DDoS attacks.”, reports TorrentFreak. An official statement from the torrent site reads, “Extratorrent faced tons of cyberattacks over the last three days. Most of them were DDOS attacks. Cloudflare can’t help us because we get 40 to 50 million requests from the U.S. every hour!”
To counter the attacks on the popular torrent site, the officials have already limited several of its functions, including the log-in feature of users to ensure there are no new torrents uploaded. In addition, they have also removed the added protection against unofficial mirrors and proxy sites.
The culprits of the attack seems to be the members of those ‘unofficial’ proxy sites that ET says are “stealing” its traffic and money. A few days ago, ExtraTorrent made a few changes in the way its site content is loaded, in order to stop the these proxy sites from accessing them. This added protection has raged many proxy site owners, who then sent threatening mails to ET asking them to remove the encryption as soon as possible.
“Some hours ago (12~?) Your main website was down for like 6-7? Minutes… It will happen again, for hours, days…IF you don’t remove the encoded stuff from your website and let proxy operators, like myself, do their job”, one of the mail read.
The attack started soon after the mail was delivered, suggesting that the threats were real. However, the site is now stable and working; thanks to the ET developers who removed the sizable hoops as per the proxy sites demand.
