After suffering prolonged downtime from a massive DDoS attack last week, Demonoid has now been shut down in a raid by Ukrainian authorities, reports TorrentFreak. Demonoid is a large semi-private BitTorrent index and tracker.
ColoCall, the largest datacenter in Ukraine and the physical home of Demonoid for the past few years, was visited by government investigators last week, in the wake of the DDoS attack that took Demonoid down for several days. The DDoS was followed by pages on Demonoid redirecting to malware and spam sites for a short time.
TorrentFreak provided translated quotes from an anonymous ColoCall source, who said, "Investigators have copied all the information from the servers Demonoid [sic] and sealed them. Some equipment was not seized, but now it does not work, and we were forced to terminate the agreement with the site."
ColoCall's anonymous source confirmed that a hacker did break in to Demonoid following the DDoS attack, explaining the malware and spam redirects.
TorrentFreak conjectures that the shutdown by the Ukrainian government was a gift of sorts to the United States, as the raid's timing coincides with First Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine Valery Khoroshkovsky's first visit to the U.S., according to a source inside the Interior Ministry. Copyright infringement is allegedly a topic on the agenda for the visit.
However, while Demonoid's servers are in custody, the site's administrators are apparently not. The anonymous ColoCall source did not reveal who is behind the site, but did say that Demonoid's management is located in Mexico.
Source: TorrentFreak
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