Torrent Clients Under Attack

[GhostShip]

The battle against Peer to Peer networks all all flavours seems to be hotting up 

https://torrentfreak.com/popular-torrents-being-sabotaged-by-ipv6-peer-flood-150619/

Unknown attackers are sabotaging popular TV and movie torrents by flooding swarms with IPv6 peers. The vulnerability, which affects the popular uTorrent client, makes it nearly impossible for torrent users to download files. It's unclear who's orchestrating the attacks but it could be a guerrilla anti-piracy move.

Generally speaking, BitTorrent is a highly robust file-sharing protocol that’s not easily disrupted. However, in recent weeks there have been systematic efforts to prevent large groups of people from sharing popular pirated TV-shows and movies.

The sabotaging technique tries to make it impossible for downloaders to connect to other people by overwhelming BitTorrent swarms with IPv6 peers.
Because of its focus on IPv6, not all users are affected, but those who are sometimes see their download speeds grind to a halt. As a result it can take days to download a file, if at all.

In short the process works as follows. The attacker joins a popular torrent swarm with hundreds, if not thousands of IPv6 addresses. These fake peers request data from real downloaders, quickly filling up their request queues.
The fake peers never exchange any data but keep the client busy until they are banned,

As usual the attackers are never identified and the authorities whom are supposed to prevent abuse of the internet sit idle whilst knowing from day one whom is behind such criminal attacks, whilst they may not like what goes on in torrent land the way ahead is not to break the law but to look at legal options to resolve what the copyright industry may believe to be infringing activity, legal preventative options are the purview of law makers and judges however not maverick technologists paid by anonymous corporate conspiracist's.

[Pri]

Good reason to use private trackers where the staff are proactive in protecting the swarms from abuse. I've personally not used a public torrent site for about 8 or 9 years now due to the steep increase in quality provided at private trackers. Not to mention the other benefits like speed, quality of files and lack of Anti-P2P messing with things.

[GhostShip]

The theory is ok but as we saw from the media defender implosion the anti p2p folks will sign up to all and any sites they can gain access to in the same way as ordinary users and its not trivial to see whom are the poachers and those whom are tasked with the job as gamekeepers 

[bradhaddin81]

Yes you are right now every torrent vpn client know that how much private tracker help them in downloading I have seen people discussing about Ivacy VPN torrenting and making make it secure more which is quite interesting for users.