TorrentBR

With over 150,000 users, TorrentLeech is without doubt one of the most popular private BitTorrent communities. Sadly, during the last few weeks the site suffered annoying setbacks in the form of hacking attempts, and most recently, a denial-of-service attack which has rendered the site unusable.

Getting access to private site TorrentLeech is difficult enough if you don’t have membership or don’t know a someone with invitations. Over the last few days, those difficulties in accessing the site have been extended to members too.

The current period of intermittent, but almost complete downtime has been going on for almost two days and is caused by a DoS attack, according to a message posted a few hours ago in the site’s news section.

“TorrentLeech is very slow and unresponsive during the last 30h, due to DoS attack to our webservers. Thank you for your patience, while we are trying to block this attack.”

At this point the source of the attacks is unclear, but they seem to be persistent and serious enough to completely degrade the usability of the site.

Things haven’t been going smoothly for the site recently. According to unconfirmed reports, the site was also the target of hacking attempts over the past few weeks.

Last week several TorrentLeech users received an email from a new tracker called ‘PowerScene’, asking them to join. Some users speculated that TorrentLeech may have been hacked and some email addresses leaked, or that someone from the inside leaked user information. However, none of these claims turned out to be true, as one of the admins said that TorrentLeech wasn’t hacked, but rather their sister site, PussyTorrents.

The admin wrote: “PowerScene, we believe, hacked our sister site PussyTorrents and obtained email addresses from the database there, this problem is being sorted out as we speak and admin/sysops are already working on upgrading security on both sites so no need for concern.”

To deal with the security vulnerabilities, members of the site were already prompted to update their passwords to more secure ones weeks ago, and since a few days ago they have also had to use a captcha to login.

TorrentLeech is coming back slowly, and both the tracker and the IRC channel seem to work fine. This isn’t the first time they have had to deal with a DoS attack, so they probably know how to deal with it quite effectively now.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

TorrentLeech is Down Due to DoS Attack