Staff members at Norbits now refute these claims in a post on the weblog they recently launched. “There have been rumors that “MORRADi” has IP information on our users. This is not true. DDoS attacks don’t compromise security, it’s only the servers that are overloaded, ” they write.

In response to these “hacker” reports, several users of the tracker took their anger out on journalists who wrote about the site. Trond Bie, who writes for IT-Avisen, and commented on the case in other news outlets as well, was one of the main targets. NorBits staff have condemned these attacks, and say they will ban any users who engage in this kind of behavior.

“We condemn attacks on anyone who criticizes or speak about NorBits. We know that many have sent e-mails to public persons and journalists and we can’t emphasize clearly enough that these only are sent from a small number of our users.”

NorBits staff may have inadvertently motivated this minority, since they briefly replaced their frontpage with a caricature of Trond Bie, which they pulled from his Picasa photo album. This was meant to be a joke though, not an attack on his person, as they explain on the NorBits weblog. “When a journalist is starting to become so obsessed with a webpage that he/she writes about every little modification that is happening on it, that person must accept an humoristic response.”

The photo was removed shortly after it was posted, and for now, the Norbits domain is redirected to the website of Urospredere, an upcoming Norwegian documentary about filesharing. This documentary by Asbjørn Engedal and journalist Simon Eriksen Valvik discusses how filesharing can be made legal, the changes that are needed, and how it will all work. A good cause to support.

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

Norbits is one of these trackers, a medium sized community with over 10,000 members, most of them from Norway. Norbits has suffered downtime because of DDoS attacks before, but this time the threat may be more serious than that.

In an NFO file obtained by by IT-Avisen, a group called MORRADi takes responsibility for the attack on Norbits. “Once again we show our power! Once again we show your foolishness! This is not the first time we have done it, and it won’t be the last,” they write (translated).

“Enough is enough, you are becoming a real nuisance, and you are also a bunch of idiots that try to hide, so it’s high time we punish you! P2P is not something we want, when will you understand that? Do we have to take it as far as publishing your user database online?”

The message seems to suggest that “sceners” are behind the hack and the attacks, since they don’t want their releases shared on BitTorrent trackers. IT-Avisen journalist Trond Bie thinks this is plausible, as he told Dagbladet: “I know that there are people on the FTP scene that don’t like Norbits. It’s not improbable that such a group wanted to attack the servers. It’s happened before.” Whether the group actually has access to all the IPs, usernames and transfer logs of Norbits users remains unclear.

This would not be the first time that a private BitTorrent tracker has been hacked. Earlier this year the IP-addresses of seedboxes and of top-users on some of the larger private trackers leaked to BitTorrent. Nevertheless, this kind of information is useless to anti-piracy organizations, as it is impossible to verify whether it is legit or not.

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