ExtraTorrent, one of the largest torrent sites on the Internet, just experienced one of the most turbulent weekends in its ten year history.
While many people were celebrating Christmas, the site’s operators were busy keeping the site online, after it was pounded by DDoS attacks.
“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!” ExtraTorrent’s SAM informed us.
To counter the attacks the site temporarily limited several functions to save resources. The login functionality for users is disabled, for example, so there are no fresh torrents. In addition, the site’s operators have removed the added protection against unofficial mirror and proxy sites.
Interestingly, this added protection layer may be the reason why the site is under attack. A few days ago ExtraTorrent received an email threatening attacks, if its operators didn’t remove the encryption within 24 hours.
“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,” part of the email read.
The trouble started soon after this email was delivered, suggesting that the threats were real. For now, however, the torrent site has managed to keep the site afloat. This is in part due to the the measures it took in response.
“ExtraTorrent’s servers are still under high load but we have sufficient resources to keep it online. ET is the place to be!” SaM tells us.
ExtraTorrent is not the only site that has run into trouble lately. The Pirate Bay is also down at the time of writing. Users who try to access the site get a CloudFlare downtime warning, or a new Captcha error.
It’s unclear whether TPB is also dealing with ongoing DDoS attacks or whether their issues are of a different nature. The TPB team is aware of the problems and said that their technical crew will look into them as soon as they’ve woken up and had a beer.
Update: TPB returned online after a few hours, as expected….
Update: ExtraTorrent is still siffering from the DDoS attacks early 2017.
