The Worst Demonoid News Yet

This is a dark, dark day.

After several days of being unreachable, an announcement came about a week ago from Demonoid's admin that the site was down was "only" because of of a massive DDOS attack. It also became more widely known at that time that Demonoid had become a one-person operation. The admin cautioned that it was probably going to be some time before the site would return.

Then came the news that someone was causing traffic from both demonoid.me and demonoid.ph to be redirected to various advertising sites containing malware.

And now, this. Via Torrentfreak:

But today the roller-coaster ride plummeted to new depths, with confirmation coming out of Ukraine that the DDoS was just the beginning – the site has been busted by the authorities.

ColoCall is the largest datacenter in Ukraine and a place that has been Demonoid’s home in recent years. But in the middle of last week, in the wake of the DDoS attack, government investigators arrived at ColoCall [the largest datacenter in Ukraine] to shut Demonoid down.

[You can see the ColoCall article here, but you'll probably need to use Google's translation tool.]

"Investigators have copied all the information from the servers Demonoid and sealed them," an anonymous ColoCall source confirmed. "Some equipment was not seized, but now it does not work, and we were forced to terminate the agreement with the site."

[....]

"Shortly after [the DDoS] a hacker break-in occurred, and a few days later came the investigators," the source added.

But aside from the busting of the site, which is the biggest BitTorrent-related raid in recent memory and one that has taken out the world’s largest torrent site/tracker combo, there is a rather large international sting in the tail.

Despite general opinion that Demonoid did not contravene Ukranian law, especially since it blocked all Ukranian IP addresses to avoid upsetting the locals, the site still attracted the attention of the authorities there. That, according to a source in the country’s government, is all down to the United States getting involved.

The Verge reports:

According to one source in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the investigation was timed to coincide with Ukrainian First Deputy Prime Minister Valeriy Khoroshkovsky's visit to the United States, after he released a statement with the US Trade Representative agreeing to "redouble" intellectual property enforcement.

[....]

ColoCall source says Demonoid has backup servers elsewhere, nothing has been restored at this point.

Demonoid's servers may have been closed off, but the site's administrator appears to still be at large. The ColoCall source noted that the site's management is located in Mexico.

ZDNet observes:

The general consensus is that Demonoid did not break Ukranian law. In fact, the site went to extreme measures to avoid the wrath of local authorities: it blocked all Ukranian IP addresses. Nevertheless, it is believed that the U.S. got involved, and suddenly Ukraine started looking into the torrent site.

[....]

If the site administrator manages to bring back Demonoid, he'll have to find a new country for the site's servers. That's happened before, so there's a chance it will happen again.

Coincidentally, THE most stable bit torrent site in my personal experience over the last year or more is ExtraTorrent -- whose servers are located in Ukraine. TorrentFreak lists ExtraTorrent as number 6 in its Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2012. Demonoid came in at number 7. Makes me wonder how long it will take the-powers-that-be to start looking hard at ET.