TorrentFreak

The place where breaking news, BitTorrent and copyright collide

Police Raids Tear Apart Hungarian BitTorrent Scene

Through co-ordinated raids across the country, Hungarian police have attempted to decimate the country’s BitTorrent scene. Following the deployment of many officers, dozens of servers were seized and many of the country’s trackers shut down, including the prominent 900,000 peer ‘ncore’ tracker. An ISP, university and many seedboxes were also targeted.

This week saw unprecedented action against the Hungarian BitTorrent scene. As is always the case with these types of actions, until the smoke clears most details are largely unverified but thanks to information provided to TorrentFreak by Sct of ASVA.info (the country’s biggest P2P blog) and our Hungarian contacts, we can provide an outline.

Following investigations carried out by ASVA.hu (movie industry group) and PROART.HU (Association of Authors Rights) since early 2010, on Wednesday co-ordinated police raids across the country targeted many torrent sites, an ISP and even a technical university.

Ncore, the largest site targeted in the raids with around 900,000 peers, was the most prominent to be taken offline. Unconfirmed reports suggest that the main site may still be intact as the police only found the site’s proxy.

Ncore

ncore

While quite a few sites went down once news of the raids started to spread, it remains difficult to be 100% certain which were actually visited by the police and which went down as a precaution.

1stTorrent appears to be trouble as they are calling out for a lawyer with IT/copyright expertise but have offered users assurances that their details are safe. Bithorló definitely had their servers seized as did GigaTorrent, Evolution, Blue Dragon, Dreamland and Deja Vu.

Insane and Pirate Bay reportedly received warnings of a raid and shut down voluntarily.

It is clear, however, that the raids were significant. According to the police, more than 50 servers were seized containing more than 500tb of data. Sources have confirmed that in addition to searches on an ISP and university, many seedboxes were seized.

Some seized “servers”…

Seized Servers

Labeling the operations as “a huge milestone in the fight against Internet piracy”, the Association of Authors Rights (PROART) thanked the police for carrying out the raids and praised them for “establishing protection for the rights of creators”.

Under pressure from the United States, Hungarian authorities have carried out at least two sweeps against torrent sites in recent years, notably in 2007 and 2009.

Interestingly, a report on the PROART website from last month celebrates the news that the U.S. government recently removed Hungary from a blacklist due to its previously poor record in dealing with piracy.

In the meantime, the large Bithumen tracker, which was named in official documents as a target for closure, continues to operate from Germany.

Server raid

Related Posts

Previous Post | Next Post

  • Anonymous

    NOOOO DEM SERVERS!!!

    Bastards ;_; abused those little network ports so badly.

  • http://www.eZee.se www.eZee.se

    Thats some niiicccce hardware there.

    I hope a lot of that was encrypted – just for lulz.

  • TerribleTony

    Ooh some powerful “servers” in that picture, the only rack-mounted server server I see, might not even be one!

  • James

    Thank you police for serving the rich.
    You little slaves did a good job. Now go back to your pathetic lives and let us ruling class continue our lavish lifestyles.

  • Ninja

    Another epic failure just like the other years. Sites will be back and booming soon enough.

    Saddens me to see the police working with such scum. Really sad.

    Reminds me of the last article of sane voices within the US govt. As I pointed, they’ll be completely ignored since the only way to operate MAFIAA knows or accepts now are shadowy schemes of ‘legal blackmail’, spreading fake researches and suing innocent ppl (and gadgets along the way) ;D

  • Anonymous

    Do not blame the police for this. The police are just enforcing the law, they do not make it or choose which laws to enforce. The police did what they were supposed to (and thats good), sadly, the IP laws are terrible.

  • Stomper

    If they tried that here in the US – you have any idea how much resources they would need? there aren’t enough local cops and feds to even try such a thing. lolz – and yes ENCRYPT your HD’s people! and find a way to block your ip!

    I heard Tor might be a good program to use for security. I think VPN is kind of out of the question since the article yesterday
    https://www.torproject.org/

  • *D

    too bad the police won’t display the same zeal for drug dealers.

    small kilobytes of 0 and 1 represent the ultimate danger to the society it seems..

    LMFAO!!

  • Anonymous

    Police are going to have fun burning themselves some movies now!

  • Widget

    500TB of data? How does a tracker acquire even 1TB worth of hashes and user accounts?

  • Widget

    @7 Stomper:

    Please don’t use Tor for anything P2P related, it’s already slow enough as it is and doesn’t have the capacity to deal with people downloading gigabytes of data. People with controlling governments have legitimate (by Western standards) uses for it that can’t be achieved most any other way.

  • Szaby59

    Most of theme were seedboxes, “only” 7 trackers.

  • Stomper

    @11 Widget:

    Then how can I hide my IP address?
    I already encrypt everything and am using peerblock (which by the way i am very impressed with)

    What can I use for masking my IP thats secure? The VPN was proven to be ineffective yesterday

  • James

    @Stomper

    VPN is fine.. Just disable IPV6.

    Or, just go Freenet or Stealthnet to grab your gear.

  • Nice

    VPN is only ineffective if using PPPT with IPv6. Use OpenVPN or PPPT with IPv4 then you will be fine.

  • lol

    Yeah thats some nice hardware..

    fail soundtrack for that tho.. i mean seriously.. its just some dude unplugging network cables.. fail.

  • P

    @Stomper

    Not true, only VPN with PPTP. Just use a VPN service which offers OpenVPN or IPsec.

  • Silgrond

    Crap, why are they ruining our torrents? :<
    (a hungarian)

  • Ishtenem Otilo

    Hope the `servers` were set on self-destruct or else….

  • matt

    yeah okay @6.

    in other news, in reality land, police are following something that’s not even a law. So yes, they are at fault.

    Honestly, we’re talking the equivalent of drug raids to seize computers for false damages. does that sound like innocent for cops? no.

  • DRuNKeN MaSTeR

    That’s a sad day for all of us.

    R. from Hungary

  • anonymousX

    Okay, that’s just funny. Any decent forensics investigator knows that you pull the plug, you NEVER press the power button. Note to all torrent site admins, booby trap you power button, so that when pressed it formats your drives, easy enough to do. So long as you’ve got backups you’re fine, and then there’s no evidence ;-) This is common sense people.

  • Carus

    Truecypt has some wonderful features we should all become acuainted with

  • mack

    i like the nazi defense from an earlier post, they were just following orders, see how many nazis were hung at nuremburg for that?

    also this is a completely ineffective raid, itd have to be worldwide to actually hurt torrenters

  • Ralonto

    Well, the police must do something back for their main sponsors after all..

  • Andreas

    The following is what concerns me the most:

    “Under pressure from the United States, Hungarian authorities have carried out at least two sweeps against torrent sites in recent years, notably in 2007 and 2009.”

    I mean wtf? Seriously, WTF! Hollywood -> US Government -> Hungary / France / Sweden / etc. – Since when did Hollywood became chosen to rule the world?

  • Zoe Jennings

    Wow, the cops there must have a major shortage of real crime to deal with. Wow.

    Lou
    http://www.feds-logging.at.tc

  • General Snus

    Pirate Bay shut down voluntarily? It’s still up now and would seem pretty surprising if they actually shut down voluntarily cuz of that. What’s that statement mean?

  • x

    The tracker mentioned in the article, is PirateDay, not Pirate Bay.

  • Stomper

    All this talk about the cops should be worrying about drug lords/dealers seriously bothers me.

    Drugs should be legal in a free society. Alcohol is more damaging then most illegal drugs! Guess what would happen to the drug lords/dealers if the substance they were peddling were legal…. they’d be out of business over night.

    The part
    “Under pressure from the United States, Hungarian authorities have carried out at least two sweeps against torrent sites in recent years, notably in 2007 and 2009.”

    Is very disturbing indeed… Hungary is the one to blame for buckling under pressure from a foreign entity that has jurisdiction in their nation to begin with.

  • Dan

    I was curious about that statement as well. Maybe it means piratebay.org rather than TPB? To send TPB a voluntary shut down request is ludicrous.

  • blah

    They reach new milestones every other day and I still haven’t missed a movie or game release. Must be doing something wrong.

  • Em

    @3 TerribleTony, don’t need a rack for a 2P Opetron server. In any usual case, never-mind the eatx cases in which you can put even a 4P board with better cooling and more HDD bays that will pwn any rack server.

    If those were private trackers I couldn’t a frack about them. There are lots of seedboxes and private trackers to supply us with a lot of data. This is just a scratch compared to the amount of private bt units there are out-there.

  • P-Diddy

    Unconfirmed reports suggest that the main site may still be intact as the police only found the site’s proxy.

    LOL if that’s true

  • me

    #13 stomper: “Then how can I hide my IP address?”

    Use Freenet, I2P, Gnunet, … It won’t hide your IP address (you’re part of the swarm unless you use closed F2F systems), but it will effectively hide what you’re downloading, and where you’ve got it from.

  • dwpbike

    sounds like hungary has some good torrent sites. could we get a list of the best when they are back up?

  • Turbo

    The 2009 Hungarian raid wasn’t under pressure by American authorities, and didn’t even target torrents – they raided Coldfusion, a spammer/bulletproof hoster company. The CEO of that company also had ties with both the mafia and the police. They got raided not because of pressure by FBI, but because a rival group (possibly an insider) specifically gave away information about their activities, and how to shut them down.

    That place wasn’t about piracy, it was about spamming, scamming with fake premium SMS-payed services (porn, usually), and providing bulletproof hosting for sites doing all the above. (which included some torrent sites too, yes)

    Most of the Hungarian torrent sites – including the ones that got hit this week – have their hands in warez spamming or SMS-based premium services (from VIP status on trackers to advertising/selling seedboxes). As a Hungarian, I’m glad they got raided, as they weren’t mainly about filesharing, but making money out of warez. They got what they deserve.

  • BiggDogg

    I hope the police officers children were registered on those sites!

    RIP hungarian trackers :(

  • Sylar

    We survive. Police commence an uphill battle. Besides, there’s no clear legal environment here.

  • Whatever

    The US again…

    Trackers were not taken down because of something legal/illegal but because the US (Hollywood lobby) demanded it by blackmailing a country (and offering incentives for some politicians, police ofcourse). All that with that nice Obama in office.

    For comparison…
    The US plays the bully in all areas, see them not only making BP (a UK company) responsible but also blaming them while the leak was caused by an American company and American corruption (i mean lobby) in the American goverment in the first place.

  • Pingback: ncore.hu/ - Page 2 - TORRENTs.RO

  • hungarian

    oh noes, one week without torrents.. :( good job cops.

  • SoManyOtherSites

    Good!

    Now they just have to locate and close down all the other 50000 torrent sites on the net.

  • Shellfish

    @ 35 by Turbo

    That’s all really good information if its true, what are your sources.

  • Pingback: Police Raids Tear Apart Hungarian BitTorrent Scene | SYSTEMA

  • SEED_BABY_SEED

    WOW! File sharing is really being taken seriously, isn’t it?
    Unfortunately for the MAFIAA the internet is GLOBAL, present everywhere, not just Hungary.

  • OXYCONTIN ADDICT

    @ # 8, *D:
    “too bad the police won’t display the same zeal for drug dealers.

    small kilobytes of 0 and 1 represent the ultimate danger to the society it seems..”
    That’s because the biggest drug lords and money launderers are protected by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Where do you think they get the money for their worldwide dirty operations?

  • HungarianMan

    Not Pirate Bay …
    PirateDAY (http://pirateday.hu) :)

  • lol

    hahaha they took my sister’s computer :)

  • Anonymous

    Whoever was in charge of organizing the cables for all those “servers” did a terrible job..

  • Ettore

    I was about to mention how pathetic those servers look, but it doesn’t really matter since the hardware required to run a tracker is next to nothing.

    Sad those “servers” (read: personal PCs) were seized, just hope that the guys running them were smart enough to Truecrypt them (PW on bootup, enjoy trying to decrypt that jackasses).

    Sad day for torrents, but a good day to show everyone that you too can run a tracker !

  • Because You Can’t Torrent Beer

    Time for them to lawyer up.

  • danda

    we want nCore back!!! the best hungarian torrent site ever! plz guys try to do sth T_T we love u and we support u
    Go nCore!

  • Seedbox Master

    Oh hai!

    I have 567657438574 .hu seedboxes for sale. All dedicated servers with very fast speeds.

    Please e-mail me at seedboxes@plztellmeyoudidntreadthisfar.hu

  • Anonymous

    That site’s name is Pirate Day not Pirate Bay

  • gorehound

    U.S. government recently sucked my ass.It needed a cleaning and they did it quite good.

  • ThatRandomGuy

    Wow…they all look like old machines sold for like £20 on eBay. Not hard to replace ;)

  • gabor

    In Hungary the economical situation is currently so crap that without the promise of being able to download software and music for free, few people would spend money on (modern) computers and broadband internet access.

  • Zsolt

    0. I work in Budapest in the media industry, and always supported the P2P community, and blame the dinosaurs in the industry for all what’s happening. Not acknowledging the facts, and trying to tie the knot further on consumers is a no-go.

    1. I don’t know why do you blame Hollywood for this raid. Better to look at EU copyright practice (yes, maybe Hollywood pressurizes through the EU, but Hungary wanted to become part of the EU, not the other way).
    2. There were several occasions throughout the last few years, when the EU warn Hungary about the lousy copyright law enforcement. I don’t know about the US warn, but it’s probably true as well.
    3. Since Hungary is a small player in the media industry (apart from porn, that’s it) we don’t have too much to protect. It’s natural, that IPs of the big international organizations are curated, and not our inland ones.
    4. The Hungarian P2P scene is just like Eastern Europe – murky. The common premium SMS based access is very questionable. You can compare with advertising, but in my opinion it’s just some people collecting (lots of) money in an unethical way. I’m pretty happy if these services disappear, as it does more harm to the scene.
    5. I’m very curious if the users identity could be revealed through the collected phone numbers – if it’s not pre-paid, then it seems possible to me too. In Hungary downloading for self purposes is legal. Sharing is not, if you profit on it. Downloading is not stealing, profiting on it is.
    6. Look, ProArt and ASVA had their moment in this year, and that’s it. They don’t do too much anyway, apart from continuously refraining the copyright holders opinions. Lobbying in Hungary is a joke anyways.

    I really hope the Hungarian P2P scene will be more clean afterwards this raid. For one, I’m more happy for this raid, than sad. The seriuos trackers will come back in short time, the lousy ones will die – and that’s a good thing. The police helped to clean up the scene a little bit, and those, who unethically profited from downloads deserve the punishment for doing so.

  • SomeGuy

    New mod released for server owners.

    If the eth0 delinks it blows the hard drive… On sales… 75 euro. get urs now!.. PS. patent pending

  • QuadSlacker1313

    This is naturally what happens when the people elect fascists into public office, yes?

  • anon88

    Don’t talk bad about nazis.
    Nazis > commies

  • goo

    how do you use Freenet/Stealthne?

  • Anonymous Hungarian

    “Wow, the cops there must have a major shortage of real crime to deal with. Wow.”

    That’s the saddest thing of all. The case is quite the opposite. Hungary is currently dying of the cancer that is present all over Europe. The gypsies. No week passes without such news where the gypsy scum attack and murder innocent (mostly old and retired) people for the content of their wallet or for their pension. But these savages are protected and supported by laws, while they leech on the money of Hungarian taxpayers. A survey showed that in Hungary, more than 50% of the children under the age of 8 are now roma. They just breed and breed to receive even more support. If they participate in incest and successfully produce inbred and therefore disabled and mentally retarded children, they get even more money. Nice, huh? But enough of the gypsies for now.

    My point is, most of the Hungarian people became so poor, they couldn’t afford to buy anything right now except basic things just to stay alive, while working all day for money which barely covers their overhead expenses. Those who buy original music, movies etc. are considered snobs and are often excommunicated.

    The police does nothing to eliminate gypsy crime. The police officers are afraid for themselves and their families, they won’t chase the criminals. Instead, these lowlife copyright protection people use them for actions that mobilize the money of taxpayers to hurt the very same innocent taxpayers. People are not going to buy more copyrighted stuff, no matter what they do…

    I could go on all day about the crime rates, economy and such other things, but now I’ll just add another info related to these events: the raids didn’t stop yesterday. Today the remaining servers of the previously mentioned nCore tracker were seized. For those who speak Hungarian, here’s more:

    hxxp://asva.info/ma-is-folytatodott-a-p2p-razzia-2010-06.html

    Let’s hope the Hungarian P2P scene recovers quickly from these damages.

    (by another Hungarian)

  • From Me

    Encrypt HD will do notting with police. Here in Canada, we must give all pc credential when we are busted to access it or we face justice…

  • Anonymous

    They could learn a lot from The Pirate Bay, which has set up their servers outside their home country, protected by a pass-through proxy server located in a third country.

  • Anonymous

    “Police are going to have fun burning themselves some movies now!”

    No. There is no movie on BT servers just shortcut (called torrent file) and tracking information for torrent still not using magnet links.

  • HunMiska

    They raided again, this time they mostly took nCores remaining servers. They’re unuasally effective and organised. :(
    nCore could be a big loss for the hungarian torrent community: more than 100 000 users (1% of the entire population), good community, easily the biggest and best hungarian site), but some of the smaller still functionong sites are already holding free regs, and the sites which went down as a precaution are coming back to life.
    Ultimately these raids will amount to nothing in “the war against filesharing”, unless they can do it again in the next weak and the next and the next…

  • The Encrypt Keeper

    “Encrypt HD will do notting with police. Here in Canada, we must give all pc credential when we are busted to access it or we face justice…”

    I’m not sure you understand how hidden volumes and such work…

    From Trucrypt’s website:

    “Provides plausible deniability, in case an adversary forces you to reveal the password:

    Hidden volume (steganography) and hidden operating system.”

    What this means is that you have an encrypted volume within an encrypted volume. Each require different keys for access. The key is what allows you not just access, but also controls the visibility of volumes. One key is for the decoy volume with a clean and innocent looking OS and all legal media so you appear to be a good little consumer to the investigators. No p2p clients. No cached p2p websites. Install iTunes and any other software that would make a file sharer’s skin crawl. Occasionally use this volume to browse youtube, wikipedia, or check your gmail etc… so it appears active.

    The other key is for the volume where your real data and a separate OS goes. The real volume/OS within the decoy appears to be free space containing random characters when accessing the PC using the decoy key. There is no indication that anything else exists at all until you enter the correct key.

    You give them the decoy key without hesitation. Maybe leave it on a post-it next to your monitor. You are innocent of course and have nothing to hide… other than all that stuff on your hidden volumes. Some website must’ve been spoofing your IP or something, because you’ve never even heard of BitTorrent before. What is a tracker?

  • Jay

    Hahaha. Those are n00b servers. Tower based desktop hardware?… Pffttt… I use rackmounts and blades for mine :P Intel Xeon ftw.

  • xxxxxxxxxxx

    “Hahaha. Those are n00b servers. Tower based desktop hardware?… Pffttt… I use rackmounts and blades for mine :P Intel Xeon ftw.”

    Because you can afford that, unlike most people in Hungary.

  • torrentsux

    Good riddance to all those parasites, enjoy your jail time.

  • bigmac

    ncore has over 1 million peers

  • Pingback: Urheberrecht: Schlag gegen Ungarns Torrent-Szene « petanews

  • torrentsrox

    @70

    i bet you can’t run a server because you too much of a noob to even know hot to run it?

  • anti

    do like you did in ’56 hungary.
    Fuck this repression

  • Doink

    and another one bites the dust.

    hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe

  • Joe

    when is the auction???

  • duddits

    @57 Zsolt

    I thank you. Most folks here in North America have never been to EU web pages much less even know what EbS is.

    I have not watched paid Premium SMS lately because I thought it was minor after new law/regulation protect teenagers. Have to watch again; it is semi-organized crime. Darn.

  • bob

    dono if its not that hard to link the alarm to the network systems alarm goes off,

    all systems are automatically locked and Master keys are destroyed on the encrypted volumes and then rebooted with 24x Wiped HDD command from start to end (it will only get 0.1% the way throw wiping the hdds before power is removed but that’s all you need really, wiping the master Key on the HDD Will render the systems unrecoverable even with an court order for the pass worded as it be useless if the master key on the disk is gone)

    You can take it an step more and lock the disks them self’s making them Very unusable (even more if your use Seagate disks that also can encrypt the disk in HW with out the OS needing to but software disk encrypt good as well)

    Not that I know how to do any of that but to an Linux user I guessing its not that hard to set of an command to Wipe stuff when it gets an alarm warning

  • Dwa

    @77
    And just in case, lock the server room and keep your key in a separate place :)

    Gives enough time for the wiping.

  • Echo

    “Thank you police for serving the rich!

    You little slaves did a good job!

    Now go back to your pathetic lives, and let us ruling class continue our lavish lifestyles.”

    Echoed

  • The United Hackers Association

    500TB which is actually the same stuff repeated on 50 servers means its about 10TB roughly a server

    I have more then 10TB
    HOW about the other million of us that do.

    JUST going after the weakest link.

  • Trelew

    “Through co-ordinated raids across the country, Hungarian police have attempted to decimate the country’s BitTorrent scene. ”

    In a related story, a mini crime wave started because the police resources were being taken up appeasing corporate interests.

  • whipped

    Comment #57 by “Zsolt” is so right! Forward thinkers like this could really turn things around so all could be happy. Well most any ways. This all makes me wonder, will there ever be a solution?

    By the way, I don’t sell anything I download and I spend my fair share on media each year. (2,500 +) As with music, I just end up buying the cd anyways after I”ve sampled the work if there is some truly artistic value to it.
    I’m sure there are alot of people like me who would not make copes and sell them. It has been proven that the downloaders spend more on media than people who have never heard of TPB etc.

  • Pingback: Quick & Dirty (11) « Journal du Hack

  • Anonymous

    @22

    common sense?

    http://www.kurt.hu/

    and you can f*ck your common sense. a format won’t stop anybody except a grandma to restore data.

    *real* erasure takes hours or even days.

  • Anonymous

    @62 well said (and sad) …

  • omgwtf
  • fckthem

    just to investigate let’s fck all your biz, seize all your hardware, and if later you are found not guilty, sorry for ruining your biz :P

  • BTGuard - BitTorrent Anonymously

NewsBits

Even more news...

  • Blu-ray Anti-Piracy Tech Stops Discs and Promotes Purchases

    An anti-piracy system present in all official Blu-ray players since 2012 has received a fresh update...

  • Foxtel Breeds Pirates by Locking Up Game of Thrones

    One of the main reasons why people turn to piracy is the lack of legal alternatives....

  • UK Student Admits Breaching Sony Copyrights With Leak of PS3 SDK

    Last year an Internet user known as El Nomeo leaked version 3.70 of Sony’s Playstation3 SDK...

  • Pirates Can Be Identified Despite Sharing IP Addresses, ISP Claims

    Carrier-Grade Network Address Translation is a network mechanism through which many Internet subscribers can share the...

  • Feds Seize Cash from Major Bitcoin Exchange’s Dwolla Account

    The U.S. Government has taken a significant action against the web’s top Bitcoin exchange by seizing...

MostDiscussed

Below are TorrentFreak's most discussed articles of the past month. Join the discussion if you like.

CopyQuote

Left Quote

“The Pirate Bay has been one of the most important movements in Sweden for freedom of speech, working against corruption and censorship.

Peter Sunde Left Quote

PopularArticles

A selection of some TorrentFreak's classics dug up from our archives.