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Two of the three co-founders of The Pirate Bay— Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg —have been ordered by a Finnish court to pay record labels $477,800 in compensation for copyright infringement on the site. Last year in a similar case, Helsinki District Court in Finland ordered Peter Sunde , the third co-founder of The Pirate Bay, to pay nearly $395,000 (350,000 Euros) in damages to several major record labels, including Sony Music, Universal Music and Warner Music. However, Sunde did not pay any penalty yet, and instead, he later announced his plans to sue those record labels for defamation. The Pirate Bay is still the world's most popular torrent website that has proven to be an elusive hub for illegal copyrighted contents, even after a series of raids and shutdown of its multiple domains , including the primary .SE domain. All the three co-founders of The Pirate Bay were facing criminal copyright infringement and abuse of electronic communications charges...

After the closures of Kickass Torrents and Torrentz.eu, the torrent community now bids farewell to ExtraTorrent, once the second most popular torrent site worldwide. ExtraTorrent has officially shut down. Users should stop searching for 'extratorrents unblock' and 'extratorrents proxy' websites. In a clear message on its homepage, ExtraTorrent announced on Wednesday that it has permanently shut down, bidding "farewell" to its millions of users. The shutdown message reads: "ExtraTorrent has shut down permanently. ExtraTorrent with all mirrors goes offline. We permanently erase all data. Stay away from fake ExtraTorrent websites and clones. Thanks to all ET supporters and the torrent community. ET was a place to be..." The message does not explain the reason for the shutdown but indicates that the popular torrent index will not return. Launched in November 2006, ExtraTorrent became the world's second-largest torrent index after The Pirate Ba...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

The federal authorities have finally arrested the alleged mastermind behind the world's largest and most notorious BitTorrent distribution site Kickass Torrents (KAT) , the US Justice Department announced on Wednesday. After The Pirate Bay had suffered copyright infringement hardship, Kickass Torrents (KAT) became the biggest and most-used pirate site on the Internet, attracting millions of daily unique visitors. However, the site appears to be offline after its alleged owner Artem Vaulin , a 30-year-old Ukrainian national was apprehended in Poland today, and the US government has requested his extradition. Although some proxy sites seem to be currently up and running, its main site, https://kat.cr , appears to be down worldwide and most of the other Kickass Torrents domains, including kickasstorrents.com, kastatic.com, thekat.tv, kat.cr, kickass.cr, kickass.to, kat.ph, have been seized by the authorities. Charges Filed Against Kickass Torrents Owner Accord...

The Pirate Bay has fought many legal battles since its launch in 2003 to keep the website operational for the last 13 years. However, this time The Pirate Bay is suffering a major blow after the Swedish Court ruled Thursday that it will take away the domain names 'ThePirateBay.se' and 'PirateBay.se' of the world's most popular torrent website and will hand over them to the state. As its name suggests, The Pirate Bay is one of the most popular file-sharing torrent site predominantly used for downloading pirated or copyrighted media and programs free of charge. Despite the criminal convictions, the torrent site remains functioning although it has moved to different Web domains several times. However, this time, The Pirate Bay loses its main .SE domain, the world's 225th most popular website according to the Alexa ranking, according to Swedish newspaper DN . "In common with the District Court ruling the Court of Appeal finds that there is a b...

The controversial file-sharing website The Pirate Bay will still be running in Sweden as the District Court of Stockholm on Friday ruled that they be unable to force the internet service providers (ISPs) to block the website from operating. The Pirate Bay is an infamous Swedish search engine predominantly used worldwide for pirating material, such as software, movies, music files and TV shows, entirely free of charge. Numerous ISPs around Europe block the Pirate Bay, but the notorious site will not be inaccessible in its home country Sweden, at least for now, according to the local media . Last year, a lawsuit was filed by Warner Music, Sony Music, Universal Music, Nordisk Film and the Swedish Film Industry in order to force Swedish ISP broadband companies to block the Pirate Bay, claiming them liable for the infringements of its customers. Also Read:   The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 "Raid-Proof" Virtual Machines To Avoids Detection However, the Broadband...

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg , the co-founder of the notorious file-sharing website The Pirate Bay , has been released from a Sweden prison following three years behind bars for hacking and copyright offenses. Yes, Svartholm Warg, also known as Anakata , is a free man again. Svartholm was convicted on both Swedish copyright offences and Danish hacking conspiracy connected to The Pirate Bay. The news comes just a few months after the third and last founder of Pirate Bay Fredrik Neij (also known as  TiAMO ) was released from a Swedish prison after serving his 10-month prison sentence. Svartholm has not yet made any public statements following his release from a Swedish prison on Saturday. His release was reported by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter . However, the release was confirmed by Warg's mother Kristina Svartholm on Twitter . "Yes, #anakata is free now. No more need to call for #freeanakata. Thank you everyone for your important support during thes...

Two weeks ago, we reported how a serious flaw in the popular peer-to-peer BitTorrent file sharing protocols could be exploited to carry out a devastating distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, allowing lone hackers with limited resources to take down large websites. Good news is that the developers of BitTorrent have fixed the security issue in its service that is being used by hundreds of Millions of users worldwide. In a blog post published Thursday, BitTorrent announced that the flaw was resided in a reference implementation of the Micro Transport Protocol (uTP) called libuTP , which is used by many widely used BitTorrent clients such as μTorrent , Vuze and Mainline . The San Francisco company also announced that it has rolled out a patch for its libuTP software that will stop miscreants from abusing the p2p protocol to conduct Distributed Reflective Denial-of-Service (DRDoS) attacks. DRDoS attack is a more sophisticated form of conventional DDoS att...

A flaw discovered in several widely used BitTorrent applications, including uTorrent, Vuze and Mainline , could be used to carry out a devastating distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that makes it very easy for a single undetectable hacker to bring down large sites. A new research by Florian Adamsky of the City University London shows that open BitTorrent protocol can be exploited to carry out Distributed Reflective Denial of Service (DRDoS) attacks . The bitTorrent protocol is a file-sharing protocol used by Millions of active online users at any given point in the day to exchange files over the Internet. DRDoS attack is a more sophisticated form of conventional DDoS attack where open and misconfigured DNS (Domain Name System) can be used by anyone to launch high-bandwidth DDoS attacks on target websites. In a paper , titled " P2P File-Sharing in Hell: Exploiting BitTorrent Vulnerabilities to Launch Distributed Reflective DoS Attacks ," the resea...

After installing Windows 10, Feeling like your Internet Bandwidth is dropping away? Windows 10 is stealing your network bandwidth. Along with the privacy features related to Wi-Fi Sense , Windows 10 users should check for another hidden by default feature that uses your network bandwidth to share updates with other Windows 10 users across the Internet. Microsoft launched Windows 10 on July 29 and offered a free upgrade to Windows 7,8 and 8.1 users , and for anyone who wants to download it. But, handling millions of simultaneous 3.5GB downloads is quite difficult for the company. So, in order to cope up with the issue, Microsoft has baked a new feature into its latest desktop operating system that uses the torrent-style approach to obtain software updates , allowing Windows 10 users to download updates from other users. Also Read:  How to Fix 35+ Windows 10 Privacy Issues With Just One Click . Windows 10 is Stealing your Internet Bandwidth The feature, kn...

The four co-founders of The Pirate Bay, the world's most popular torrent website, have been cleared of charges alleging criminal copyright infringement and abuse of electronic communications in a Belgian court. The Pirate Bay co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm , Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström were acquitted by a Belgian court located in Mechelse after it was found that they could not be held responsible for the file-sharing website after selling it in 2006. The Pirate Bay's founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, the website representative Peter Sunde and the website investor Carl Lundström were facing criminal charges related to their involvement with the torrenting site that has proven to be an elusive hub for illegal copyrighted content. The Pirate Bay was Sold to other Investors in 2006 However, the case fell apart when the Pirate Bay's co-founders said that they were not involved in any activity related to the website after they sold it to Re...

Fredrik Neij , the third and the last founder of the infamous file-sharing website The Pirate Bay , was released on Monday from a Swedish prison. Neij, who goes by the online moniker " TiAMO ", was arrested by Thai immigration authorities at the end of November 2014 while he was trying to cross the border illegally from Laos to Thailand and then extradited to a prison in Skänninge, Sweden. Fredrik Neij is Now a FREE Man However, after his ten-month prison sentence, Neij is now a free man and has already reunited with family and friends, TorrentFreak reports . The 37-year-old fugitive Swede man was first convicted of aiding copyright infringements by a Swedish court in 2009 and escaped arrest by fleeing to Laos. However, Neji's passport was revoked in 2012, and then after two years in November 2014, he was arrested under an Interpol warrant near the Laotian border after four years on the run. Before his arrest, Neji was living and hosting a f...

If you have recently installed or updated the popular BitTorrent client μTorrent 3.4.2 Build 28913 on your computer, then you read this warning post right now. Users of the μTorrent file-sharing service are complaining that the latest update of software used for torrent downloading is silently installing a piece of unwanted software called EpicScale , which is basically a Bitcoin mining software . Note: Story update has been added below. USER COMPLAINTS ON SILENT  INSTALLATION The Epic Scale , installed without the consent of users, is a cryptocurrency mining software that reportedly uses the combined computing power of users to generate Bitcoin income for BitTorrent company. The unwanted software slows down the host computers and is particularly harder to remove from the system. The Bitcoin mining software was recently highlighted at uTorrent's complaint forum where a member ' Groundrunner ' says: " There was no information about this during ins...

So far, the torrent users didn't forget the incident of The Pirate Bay seizer, that another most popular Torrent website, KickAss Torrents , has been kicked off by the Somalian registry. KickAss Torrent download website has lost access to its Kickass.so - the Somalian domain with millions of unique visitors per day and the most visited torrent website on the Internet. The domain is currently offline and, according to TorrentFreak, the Somalia based KickAss Torrent download domain was recently listed as "banned" by the .so registry, forcing the site's operators to switch to another domain. Just like The Pirate Bay , KickAss Torrents is also a well-known torrent download service that has often been criticized for providing easy access to pirated content, so it's no surprise that the ban came following a complaint received by Somalian authorities. KickAss Torrents website stopped working around 4 am ET and is still offline and will not be returning. Howeve...