New torrents stopped appearing on The Pirate Bay

The year 2018 at The Pirate Bay was particularly difficult. Attempts (and not always unsuccessful) to split the domain of the resource, lack of funds for the maintenance of the tracker, attacks from the government bodies of different countries and companies. All this led to the fact that the work of The Pirate Bay began to occur interruptions, and quite often.

The administration of the resource is not particularly spread about the problems, but they were, and quite a lot. But it may well be that 2019 will become even more difficult, or has already become. The fact is that one more problem has been added to all the problems - new torrents have ceased to appear on The Pirate Bay. Over the past weekend, no one posted anything on the resource, which is rather strange.

And this is not a seeming problem, the official tracker page shows that for a couple of days new torrents have not appeared. What kind of problem led to the inoperability of "Pirate Bay" is still unclear.



Several people asked a question on the official resource forum, but no official explanation followed. When trying to download a torrent, the resource displays the message “Error - File empty” or “Wrong Code”.

In principle, this has already happened, but the problem has never been so long - the administration has always quickly taken action. In addition to torrents, the problem is also with comments - now their placement comes with a creak, the commenting system then works then no.

There is another technical problem - the inaccessibility of the tracker for users in many countries of the world. Somewhere The Pirate Bay is blocked, somewhere not, but sometimes the site is simply unavailable. Experts say that the inaccessibility of the resource is not related to the blocking of the tracker by Internet providers, since the “Bay” is sometimes not immediately available for the whole world (or, at least, for most of it).

Most of all, this problem manifested itself last year, in the last months of the outgoing 2018. Thus, visitors saw only a page with an error from the cloud provider Cloudflare . The resource was available through Tor or VPN, but did not work when trying directly. And the problem was not local, it related to users from the USA, Europe, Latin America and other regions.

The resource URL worked, the address was resolved, there were no problems with these factors.

And another problem The Pirate Bay, no longer associated with the internal kitchen of the resource - it is the viruses that spread through it. Recently, cybersecurity experts discovered that one of the torrents, which was positioned by the person who posted it, as a link to the popular film “The Girl in the Spider's Web” (a film about hackers, by the way), was in fact a dangerous virus. At the time of detection of the malicious nature of the file, there were several thousand seeders.

Instead of a movie, the downloaded torrent received a .LNK file with a batch file.



When analyzing the file, it turned out that this is a sample of CozyBear, a representative of the same family as APT29, CozyDuke, CozyCar, Grizzly Bear. All of its representatives are attacking the Windows platform, with the first copies of this kind of malware first appeared in 2015.

A little later, it turned out that this was not CozyBear at all, the problem is much more dangerous. The malware does not harm the user's files, it starts to show ads in the search results of Google, Yandex and even on Wikipedia. In addition, he is able to identify pages with cryptocurrency web wallets, after which he transfers the funds discovered to his owners.

The malware modifies the registry keys of a compromised machine in order to deactivate Windows Defender (in case protection is active). And then it downloads and installs the Firefox extension, which is called “Firefox Protection”. For Chrome, this is “Chrome Media Router”. Once everything is ready, and the user starts the browser, the malware is activated and the fun begins. He activates ads on different pages, asks for a charitable contribution in favor of the Wiki, steals a cryptocurrency and shows advertisements for malware, masking them as “white” software.

By the way, the virus turned out to be one of the latest files uploaded to The Pirate Bay. But, of course, the problem with the health of the resource is clearly not caused by a virus.