The Pirate Bay was recently down for over a week due to a DDoS attack

Oct 29, 2019

It seems like the prolonged downtime and technical
difficulties faced by The Pirate Bay over the past several weeks
were due to a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS)
attacks against the widely-popular torrent website by malicious
actors.

For those unaware, The Pirate
Bay ^[1] was down for more than a
week with most visitors displayed a Cloudflare error mentioning
that a “bad gateway” is causing problems, while others served with
a “database maintenance” message prompting users to check back in
10 minutes.

Though the site’s moderators did not reveal any details
regarding the Pirate Bay downtime, a reputable source with a direct
link with the operators told Torrent Freak
that the recent Pirate Bay downtime issues “were likely caused by
malicious actors who DDoSed the site’s search engine with specially
crafted search queries.”
^[2]

The attacker(s) flooded The Pirate Bay with “searches that break
the Sphinx search daemon,” effectively crashing the torrent
download website, making site visitors unable to download magnet
links or torrent files.

Sphinx is an open source full-text search engine, and The
Pirate Bay reportedly used an older version of the software.

According to the source, The Pirate
Bay ^[3] has since updated Sphinx
to the newer version of the software, which has resolved the crash
issues, though the free torrent download site is still returning
errors in some regions.

“Due to the high volume of malicious search queries, it wasn’t
possible to log the errors and send a bug report, which complicated
matters.”

It is still not clear who targeted The Pirate Bay and what was the
motive of attackers behind it. The staffer or moderators have not
yet spoken anything about the incident.

The Pirate Bay is one of the most popular and most visited
file-sharing websites predominantly used to share copyrighted
material free of charge, allowing users to download software,
movies, music, and TV shows for free.

The Pirate Bay is usually in the news for copyright
infringement ^[4] by movie studios, music
producers, and software creators, due to which many
ISPs ^[5] across several countries
block the free torrent download website.

However, users can still access The Pirate Bay using piratebay
proxies or a secure VPN service. But, it should be noted that
piratebay proxies would not help much to maintain anonymity, and
also, many of these sites and mirrors include malicious
copycats.

The Hacker News always advises its readers to avoid illegal ways
to download movies for free. Instead, it would be best if you use
free movie streaming sites or Netflix, like streaming services to
watch your favorite movies online.

References

^{^}
The Pirate Bay
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
Torrent Freak
(torrentfreak.com)
^{^}
The Pirate Bay
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
copyright infringement
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
many ISPs
(thehackernews.com)

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OWASP TOP !0

Injection. Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. Broken Authentication. Application functions related to authentication and session management are often implemented incorrectly, allowing attackers to compromise passwords, keys, or session tokens, or to exploit other implementation flaws to assume other users’ identities temporarily or permanently. Sensitive Data Exposure. Many web applications and APIs do not properly protect sensitive data, such as financial, healthcare, and PII. Attackers may steal or modify such weakly protected data to conduct credit card fraud, identity theft, or other crimes. Sensitive data may be compromised without extra protection, such as encryption at rest or in transit, and requires special precautions when exchanged with the browser. XML External Entities (XXE). Many older or poorly configured XML processors evaluate external entity references within XML documents. External entities can be used to disclose internal files using the file URI handler, internal file shares, internal port scanning, remote code execution, and denial of service attacks. Broken Access Control. Restrictions on what authenticated users are allowed to do are often not properly enforced. Attackers can exploit these flaws to access unauthorized functionality and/or data, such as access other users’ accounts, view sensitive files, modify other users’ data, change access rights, etc. Security Misconfiguration. Security misconfiguration is the most commonly seen issue. This is commonly a result of insecure default configurations, incomplete or ad hoc configurations, open cloud storage, misconfigured HTTP headers, and verbose error messages containing sensitive information. Not only must all operating systems, frameworks, libraries, and applications be securely configured, but they must be patched/upgraded in a timely fashion. Cross-Site Scripting XSS. XSS flaws occur whenever an application includes untrusted data in a new web page without proper validation or escaping, or updates an existing web page with user-supplied data using a browser API that can create HTML or JavaScript. XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim’s browser which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, or redirect the user to malicious sites. Insecure Deserialization. Insecure deserialization often leads to remote code execution. Even if deserialization flaws do not result in remote code execution, they can be used to perform attacks, including replay attacks, injection attacks, and privilege escalation attacks. Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities. Components, such as libraries, frameworks, and other software modules, run with the same privileges as the application. If a vulnerable component is exploited, such an attack can facilitate serious data loss or server takeover. Applications and APIs using components with known vulnerabilities may undermine application defenses and enable various attacks and impacts. Insufficient Logging & Monitoring. Insufficient logging and monitoring, coupled with missing or ineffective integration with incident response, allows attackers to further attack systems, maintain persistence, pivot to more systems, and tamper, extract, or destroy data. Most breach studies show time to detect a breach is over 200 days, typically detected by external parties rather than internal processes or monitoring.

The Pirate Bay was recently down for over a week due to a DDoS attack

References

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