A member of support staff at Xirvik, a company selling seedboxes and other related services, told us a little about b4rt and the serious exploit one of their customers has just discovered.

“Torrentflux-b4rt is one of the major fully multi-user BitTorrent frontends that exist. It supports several clients (such as BitTornado and Transmission), the source code is available, and it’s been around for a long time.”

Xirvik told TorrentFreak that they have discovered a major bug in TorrentFlux-b4rt, one which could lead to users having access to other users’ torrents. While that might not initially sound that threatening, for private tracker users it constitutes quite a security breach. Contained in those .torrent files is the user’s unique torrent passkey which allows sharing on a private site. Getting access to this allows the attacker to masquerade as the other user on private trackers

A user can access another user’s torrents if he already knows the exact name of the torrent (easy to find from any search engine) and provided, of course, it is present on the server.

“Given a torrent with a name such as Ubuntu.8.10.Server-CANONICAL.torrent that already exists on the server, another user could upload another torrent with the name ubuntu.8.10.server-canonical.torrent (not necessarily all lowercase – just one different character is enough) and get access to the first file,” Xirvik explains.

Luckily Xirvik has not only found the bug and reported it, but have also worked on a fix which can be found here on the TorrentFlux-b4rt forums.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The downside to having a seedbox is of course that they are not free. To some this isn’t a problem, “I pay for my Internet connection, so why not pay a few extra bucks to get the best out of it,” is an argument we often hear. Others, however, are satisfied with the speeds they get, and don’t want to pay extra for BitTorrent traffic.

So why should people use these seedboxes? What are the benefits? Here are some of the advantages.

1. Competition.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, users on private trackers are extremely competitive. No matter how many torrents you have seeding, or how you’ve managed to tweak the BitTorrent client settings, there’s just no competing with the uploading power of a seedbox. With many elite private trackers, a seedbox is not just recommended, they’re almost essential for account longevity.

2. Speed.

Most seedboxes are on 100Mbit lines, which makes them really fast. Unquestionably faster than your home Internet access – unless you live in Japan or Sweden, that is. You can sit back, relax and watch in amazement at how fast the torrents finish. Gigabyte files will be downloaded in minutes, practically without limitations. Of course, you’ll still be limited to the speed of your home connection when you want to transfer these files from the server to your computer.

3. Uploading.

Some users of private trackers are less concerned about the downloading, and more about seeding. Good ratios are crucial to a healthy membership – without them, the account will wither away and die. With a seedbox, your ratio will be 1:1 within minutes, not days. 10:1 ratios are not uncommon within the first hour for popular torrents. No more do you have to seed the torrent for weeks just to stay in the good graces with your private tracker. You’ll be free to delete seeding torrents, and replace them with other ones.

4. No more throttling and bandwidth limiting ISPs

ISPs like Comcast are known to throttle your BitTorrent traffic, and they will soon introduce a monthly bandwidth limit of 100GB. With a seedbox you can bypass these limitations. Your seedbox traffic is not counted towards your ISP account stats and won’t be throttled. The only time it becomes ‘your’ traffic is when you choose to download the files from a finished torrent to your home PC, and uploading torrent traffic will not eat into your cap.

5. They’re Secure & Safe

With a seedbox, you don’t even need to use a BitTorrent client on your home computer – your worries about the RIAA or MPAA spying on you are over. No more DMCA notices or warning letters from your ISP – and more importantly, no lawsuit letters will be coming either.

Where to get a Seedbox…

Seedboxes aren’t cheap, but they don’t have to break the bank. Many services now offer a ‘torrent-specific’ seedbox packages that are great for entry-level users. Here is an affordable seedbox solution:

Happy torrenting…

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.