The current period of intermittent, but almost complete downtime has been going on for almost two days and is caused by a DoS attack, according to a message posted a few hours ago in the site’s news section.

“TorrentLeech is very slow and unresponsive during the last 30h, due to DoS attack to our webservers. Thank you for your patience, while we are trying to block this attack.”

At this point the source of the attacks is unclear, but they seem to be persistent and serious enough to completely degrade the usability of the site.

Things haven’t been going smoothly for the site recently. According to unconfirmed reports, the site was also the target of hacking attempts over the past few weeks.

Last week several TorrentLeech users received an email from a new tracker called ‘PowerScene’, asking them to join. Some users speculated that TorrentLeech may have been hacked and some email addresses leaked, or that someone from the inside leaked user information. However, none of these claims turned out to be true, as one of the admins said that TorrentLeech wasn’t hacked, but rather their sister site, PussyTorrents.

The admin wrote: “PowerScene, we believe, hacked our sister site PussyTorrents and obtained email addresses from the database there, this problem is being sorted out as we speak and admin/sysops are already working on upgrading security on both sites so no need for concern.”

To deal with the security vulnerabilities, members of the site were already prompted to update their passwords to more secure ones weeks ago, and since a few days ago they have also had to use a captcha to login.

TorrentLeech is coming back slowly, and both the tracker and the IRC channel seem to work fine. This isn’t the first time they have had to deal with a DoS attack, so they probably know how to deal with it quite effectively now.

Update: TorrentLeech moved to a new location and the site is back up.

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

Why would anyone bother accessing a private site when you can get great stuff from PirateBay or Mininova? Most users cite better download speeds, great timing and availability of content while others believe they have better security. Most private trackers require that the user maintains a good ‘ratio’ – i.e he uploads back to the community the amount of data that he took. Because this behavior is monitored and enforced by a range of punishments, the user tends to seed more to avoid them. The ultimate punishment for not sharing is banning, which means the member can no longer access the content indexed within, well – that’s usually the case.

Information has been published showing a method for non-members to access and download stuff from private sites, using the (optional) Azureus Peer Injector plug-in and lists of peers (BitTorrent users IP addresses and ports they use) harvested from well known private trackers. Usually it’s the tracker on a site that decides if you can join the swarm or not (while recording your stats/ratio) but by using this method it’s theoretically possible to enter the swarm of a particular torrent without ever connecting to the tracker. The theory says that as long as you can access a .torrent file originating from the site (via a torrent dump site such as mininova, a friend or the site’s unprotected RSS feed for example) plus an accurate and up to date peerlist, you can download without being a member, ratio-free.

However useful this might sound to some, there is a cost. For the method to work, the group needs to harvest user’s IP addresses from each tracker they wish to exploit and make them available for people to download. They appear to have already compromised the privacy of users of TorrentLeech and SceneTorrents by publishing their IP addresses in a peerlist, at the same time claiming the method improves the individual’s privacy.

Its common on P2P forums for people to debate the benefits and drawbacks of public and private sites. Some feel private sites restrict, while others understand that a site’s growth sometimes needs to be artificially limited due to technical, staffing or budget issues. Some feel it’s wrong to ring-fence the available media and that it should really be ‘set-free’ while others feel that it’s neat being a member at a fast tracker with great image and they’re quite happy at being part of an ‘exclusive’ club.

In any event, I guess both parties are on roughly the same side in the end and they would likely agree – although of limited use on their own, the user’s IPs on sites like TorrentLeech, SceneTorrents and any other tracker should definitely be kept as private as possible, even if others believe the torrents shouldn’t be.

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