Once upon a time, prolonged downtime at The Pirate Bay was greeted by wails of concern. Many of the site’s users would naturally presume the worst, that the site had been raided and shut down once again.
In recent years, however, persistent downtime has been a common occurrence that has gradually become the norm. That’s quite possibly a result of the pressure the site finds itself under on a daily basis, i.e constantly ensuring that it doesn’t succumb to the kinds of raids and anti-piracy actions that have hindered it in the past.
That being said, over the last several weeks downtime for regular users has been considerable. While mainly accessible via its .onion address via the Tor network, the clear web variant of the site only returned this week after roughly a month of downtime.
Nevertheless, the return wasn’t straightforward. While anyone with a basic browser setup could access the site as normal, some with a less basic setup – especially in respect of security measures – still had problems accessing the site. Users of the security software MalwareBytes were prevented from accessing any torrents whatsoever, for example.
The problem lay in The Pirate Bay’s setup. Aside from cosmetic changes to some pages, the site sends requests to another domain (apibay.org) in order to present torrents to the user on thepiratebay.org. However, those accessing the main domain with Malwarebytes installed were greeted with blank torrent pages after the security software blocked apibay.org.
Any warning of this type, especially concerning trojans, should be of concern to users of any site. However, dumping trojans on users hasn’t been the modus operandi of The Pirate Bay thus far, so TorrentFreak contacted Malwarebytes to find out what was causing the alert.
Manager of WebProtection Labs at MalwareBytes Andres Ortiz informs TorrentFreak that the issue was caused by the presence of “a few” cryptocurrency miners, not on thepiratebay.org, but on a sub-directory of apibay.org, the domain from where TPB appears to present its torrent results. The analysis for just one example miner is shown below.
After examining the apibay.org domain once again, MalwareBytes has now confirmed that the miners have been removed so in response, they will push an update to their users to stop TPB’s indexes from being blocked moving forward. However, if any party reintroduces the miners, it’s certainly possible that the site will be rendered inaccessible once again.
The Pirate Bay first introduced a coin miner back in 2017 as a way to generate additional revenue. At the time it was estimated it could potentially generate around $12,000 per month from users’ CPU cycles.
