The site, which specializes in Asian content, was reported and confirmed to be a target for an Indian anti-piracy company with an unconventional approach to enforcement.

AiPlex Software had admitted to carrying out DDoS attacks for movie companies against ICTorrent (something it later denied) but the suspicion in the community was that its activities were wider. Word quickly spread that it had also attacked The Pirate Bay and this resulted in the first wave of attacks in Operation Payback, the DDoS attacks carried out by 4chan and their supporters against anti-piracy operations.

While AiPlex Software went down in dramatic fashion, ICTorrent remained cheerfully up. According to an admin at the site, all is quiet at the moment. He told us that he’s had no DDoS attacks from AiPlex Software for 2 weeks.

It’s perhaps no coincidence that on and off, AiPlex has been under 4chan-inspired DDoS attacks itself for a similar period.

“Its just nice to see that there are anti-anti-pirates out there who are ready to fight companies who don’t seem to live by the law,” an ICTorrent admin told TorrentFreak. “I am glad to see that AiPlex got a taste of their own medicine and I would like to support 4chan in any way possible.”

Moving on to more light-hearted events, today ICT celebrates its second birthday and on this occasion has shared some interesting screenshots with TorrentFreak.

When ICTorrent releases a PDVD (a DVD encoded from an Asian Silver or Telesync source) of a Bollywood movie, they add their own clearly visible watermark to the release which is viewable throughout the movie in the top right hand corner of the screen. The watermark consists on an I and a C (from ICTorrent) which stands for Intellect Clever.

However, ‘clever’ might not be a term that could be associated with the producers of an Indian TV movie awards show. Since 2008, when ICTorrent was born, the national TV show has been running with clips of nominated movies culled from an interesting source – ICTorrent PDVDs.

The distinctive ‘i’ (for reference see the logo above) can be seen in the screenshots below from an earlier show, just below and to the right of the ‘Sony’ logo (ouch!).

Another logo which has appeared regularly on the awards show is that of Cinema Max, another outfit that places watermarks on pirate DVDs. Example below, watermark bottom right of ‘screen’ section.

After using ICTorrent sourced movie clips in 2008, 2009 and 2010, it will remain to be seen if 2011 shows the same pattern. However, if AiPlex Software renew their DDoS attacks against the site, the awards show might have a problem getting their fix this time round.

To this end, ICTorrent has issued a direct warning to AiPlex not to go back to their old ways.

“After the attacks from 9/10 to 9/11 if we receive an another DDoS attack from you we will make sure all the documents sent to us by AiPlex are made public to every single Indian Director and Producer so they know what kind of ridiculous emails you send & the kind of people you have in your company,” the site warns.

TorrentFreak has seen some of these documents and they make uncomfortable reading. Let’s see what happens next. To DDoS or not? That is the question.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

AiPlex, a company working for Bollywood studios and charging between $4,290 and $8,580 to protect a movie, go further than your average anti-piracy outfit when people don’t co-operate with them.

“The problem is with torrent sites, which usually do not oblige,” said Kumar. “In such cases, we flood the website with requests, which results in database error, causing denial of service as each server has a fixed bandwidth capacity. At times, we have to go an extra mile and attack the site and destroy the data to stop the movie from circulating further.”

Understandably there’s a bit of a ‘wow factor’ associated with these claims, not least that carrying out DoS attacks against sites is a criminal offense in many countries around the world, even if you do happen to be working for the all-powerful movie industry.

Although TorrentFreak contacted AiPlex for a comment but never received a reply, others have had more luck. Last week AiPlex contacted the BitSnoop torrent site with a copyright takedown demand for a movie they are protecting on behalf of a studio. In their correspondence, BitSnoop took the opportunity to ask AiPlex about their unorthodox approach to dealing with uncooperative torrent sites. Surprisingly Managing Director Girish Kumar denied the claims.

“Our claim with the Editor [of the publication originally publishing his comments, article still online, unedited] was pointblank that we go an extra mile in identifying the IP addresses & other contact info of such illegal sites & pass such information to the production houses to pursue with the cyber crime police,” he told BitSnoop.

“Further if the govt. provides a permission to cyber police to attack such sites, Aiplex can help the cyber police in providing the technical inputs. That said, one of the common method one can bring down the site is DDOS attack is what was explained. This does not mean that we are doing such illegal activates while we are sending the copyright notices to Infringed sites.”

So given this statement it was quite interesting to speak with the admins at ICTorrent, a private Desi tracker mentioned specifically as an AiPlex target in the original article.

“This company has contacted us 100s of times in the past; None of their emails had a PROPER Copyright Infringement Notice,” TorrentFreak was told. Indeed, we saw copies of several emails where AiPlex demanded proactive action from ICTorrent to remove movie torrents that weren’t even on the site yet.

But scrappy takedown notices aside, what happened when ICTorrent failed to comply with AiPlex’s demands? Did they DoS the site or not?

“Yes, they have done it many times and failed,” an admin explained while showing us an email from AiPlex which stated simply: ict attack on. enjoy :)

“We have been dealing with this shit since Dec/2009 from them. We usually get attacked Thursday night till Sunday as this is our primetime to release PDVDs. They DDoS attacked us by sending 1 million requests from 10 to 100 IPs, we had to block all IPs. Our servers are installed with all modules so they will block automatically.”

“I have also made a call to the company and had talked to them to stop DDOS attacks,” an admin told us.

TorrentFreak was also shown a particularly surprising email exchange where a member of AiPlex’s staff asked for a copy of a movie due to him being “a die hard fan” of a particular Bollywood actor. ICTorrent refused the request and told him to download it from the site instead.

Another email clearly suggested that money could be made by both parties if an agreement was reached and ICTorrent was “helpful” with takedowns.

ICTorrent also showed TorrentFreak other documents which showed which movie company AiPlex were acting on behalf of, but asked us not to publish them. Yet.

Reading between the lines it seems that ICTorrent want to give AiPlex another opportunity to stop their DoS attacks.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.