The Pirate Bay Disabled by DDoS Cyber-Attack

During the past few weeks, The Pirate Bay file-sharing site has faced a number of serious challenges, including orders by British and Dutch courts forcing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block user access.

Now, the controversial site is facing an even bigger threat: a special type of web-based attack has disabled the site altogether.

According to recent reports, The Pirate Bay was completely disabled and inaccessible for more than a day after it was struck by what appears to have been a distributed denial of service (or DDoS) attack.

This kind of attack involves a massive number of computers flooding a website with requests for files and other activities. The sheer number of requests overwhelms the site's servers and make it impossible for legitimate requests to be processed. The site then shuts down.

Anonymous 'Hacktivists' Probably Not Responsible

The attack appears to have started early Wednesday morning, Eastern Standard Time. Shortly thereafter, The Pirate Bay announced that it was "under a quite big ddos attack."

"We don't know who's behind it but we have our suspicions," the unknown Pirate Bay spokesperson said. "Once we've awaken our tech guru Winston Q we'll get on the issue."

A few hours later, it appeared the site might actually survive the attack. "[We're] getting back up [and] stronger than ever," the spokesperson said while directing users to a number of proxy servers. (Source: pcmag.com)

But the onslaught continued and eventually access to the site became "spotty," according to the BBC.

It's unlikely that a 'hacktivist' group like Anonymous was targeting The Pirate Bay, since organizations of its kind tend to avoid attacks on sites that advocate a more open Internet.

Instead, security expert Andre Stewart suggests the attack might actually be the work of copyright protection groups.

"It could be the record labels, or a government somewhere that has had enough of not being able to catch The Pirate Bay," Stewart said.

He added: "it could be just one person who had rented some cloud power from Amazon and is sitting in a cafe, and is able to launch an attack." (Source: pcmag.com)

The Pirate Bay Stands Against DDoS Attacks

Ironically, The Pirate Bay recently scolded fans who targeted Virgin Media -- a British Internet Service Provider ordered to block access to the file-sharing site -- with DDoS attacks.

"Don't fight them using their ugly methods. DDoS and blocks are both forms of censorship," a Pirate Bay spokesperson noted. (Source: bbc.com)