TorrentBytes is a major private BitTorrent website with a large user base. Its rise to fame started sometime from late 2004 to early 2005.
Note: This is an article I wrote that was published elsewhere first. It has been republished here for archival purposes
TorrentBytes’ popularity kept growing as more and more users turned to private BitTorrent websites for their daily file-sharing needs.
Things seemed to be chugging along until earlier this month when the user base for TorrentBytes found their website was not in working order.
“Unfortunately, the various DDoS attacks against our servers haven’t ceased yet, so it’s still not unusual to get time outs or errors when browsing the site,” the TorrentBytes staff wrote on June 7th. “As we said when the attacks began, we’re doing our best to contain this problem, but despite a few successes against the attacks, their variety makes them very difficult to overcome.”
The attacks persisted. While the website remained online during the attacks, its problems were becoming apparent for many users. The staff of TorrentBytes issued another notice on June 9th to reassure TorrentBytes users that work was being done, “We are doing everything we can to [stabilize] the site and have it running as it should. But it requires a lot of time and effort to come up with a way to do so.”
While efforts to restore things to their natural working order continued, one of the worst-case scenarios was realized. On June 11th, 2007, TorrentBytes was taken offline – the attackers appeared to be winning.
Then, on June 16th, the website was brought back online. “As surely most of you noticed, TorrentBytes was off line for 5 days,” the staff commented. “This was due to a hacking attempt that fortunately didn’t cause major damage – at least none we noticed so far. The DB is intact and the site files were restored to a recent backup, so the site should be almost fully functional by now. […] There’s a great deal of tune-up being made right now, so if you find any problems, only report them if they’re persistent.”
Just when things appeared to be in working order, the site was attacked again this morning. Slyck.com caught up with JEFFSR, an administrator of TorrentBytes who updated us on the situation. According to JEFFSR, TorrentBytes suffered another attack this earlier today which “wiped out the drive.”
This disastrous situation has the TorrentByte staff working around the clock to restore the site, as they are currently “starting from scratch.” Currently, the identity of the hacker is unknown. JEFFSR told Slyck there’s no danger to the user data, as it is “double encoded.”
TorrentBytes’ return could take up to a week. However JEFFSR informed Slyck.com that TorrentByte’s code was being evaluated and several safeguards were being put into place to mitigate the chances of a similar situation repeating itself.
As a final word to the responsible party, JEFFSR said, “no matter how many times this clown knocks it down we will rebuild it better. He won’t win this battle.”
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
