Cybercrime syndicate Black Team unleashes malicious network weaponising popular torrents to spread malware
Extratorrent suspects operators of the proxy or mirror sites may have brought about these attacks iStock

ExtraTorrent, one of the largest torrent sites on the internet suffered several major DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks over the past few days primarily because the site recently banned 'unofficial' proxy services.

"Extratorrent faced tons of cyber attacks over the last three days. Most of them were DDoS attacks," a spokesperson from the website told Torrent freak. He added, "Even Cloudflare can't help us because we get 40 to 50 million requests from the US every hour!"

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The site decided to take its own measure to ward off the attacks and temporarily limited several functions to save resources. The login functionality for users has also been disabled so no fresh torrent listings can be added, Additionally, the site has removed the added protection against unofficial mirror and proxy sites.

Although it is not known who are behind these attacks, the site suspects operators of the proxy or mirror sites may have brought about these attacks. In fact, a few days back ExtraTorrent received an email threatening attacks if it did not remove encryption against proxies.

"Some hours ago (12~?) Your main website was down for like 6-7? Minutes... It will happen again, for hours, days...IF you don't remove the encoded stuff from your website and let proxy operators, like myself, do their job," an excerpt read from the e-mail.

The operators are trying to keep the site fully active but say their server still under high load. Luckily the site has extra resources to keep the website online and is meanwhile trying to figure out how to stop these attacks.