Demonoid becomes next causality in war on online piracy

After an enormous distributed denial of service attack (DDoS), the web's oldest torrent tracker, Demonoid, has been shut down. 

Last week, torrent enthusiasts feared the worst when Demonoid was brought down in a DDoS. They worried that the site had been busted and brought down by governments where the servers were hosted. It turned out they were right. Now, the site has been permanently shut down by the Ukrainian government, according to Kommersant, a Ukrainian news outlet, and file-sharing advocates TorrentFreak

ColoCall, Ukraine’s largest datacenter, housed most of Demonoid’s servers. Last week, government investigators descended upon ColoCall’s server bank to it all down. 

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

ColoCall and Demonoid employees believe that the government investigation and the DDoS attack were related. 

“Shortly after [the DDoS], a hacker break-in occurred, and a few days later came the investigators,” a ColoCall spokesperson told TorrentFreak. 

As the internet laments the loss of Demonoid, some internet denizens are claiming that the torrent tracker was brought down as a “gift” from the Ukrainian government to the US — a gesture of good faith as the US cracks down on copyright infringement. 

Ukrainian news outlet Kommersant says that an anonymous source within the Ukrainian Interior Ministry stated that the raid on Demonoid was intended to coincide with Deputy Prime Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky’s visit to the United States. 

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One of the topics on the meeting agenda was copyright infringement, according to the same source. 

Demonoid attracted millions of visitors during its tenure and was hailed as one of the internet’s best and safest torrent trackers.