ZipTorrent Pollutes and Slows Down Popular Torrents
Written by Ernesto on July 16, 2007BitTorrent users are facing a new enemy. A BitTorrent client named ZipTorrent, allegedly created by our friends from the anti-piracy organization Media Defender, leeches bandwith and spreads useless data chunks.
The goal of ZipTorrent is to slow down popular downloads as much as possible. They use hundreds of these clients at the same time and this can potentially bring the average download speed down to zero. Even more so, it is not unlikely that it will record your IP-address in the process so they can send you a copyright infringement notice on top of it.
On the Media Defender website we read:
“Decoying and Spoofing are the most commonly known techniques that we employ. We send blank files and data noise that look exactly like a real response to an initiated search requests for a particular title.”
According to ubisuck over at the mininova forums, Media Defender is doing just this with ZipTorrent. Apparently the fake client is a mod of the popular BitTorrent client Azureus which can be configured to send fake data.
Here’s a full screenshot of the ZipTorrent configuration screen. As you will see, there are some dubious settings like “fake upload ratio mode”, “no upload” and “safe fake download”.
It is not hard to check whether you are connected to these fake clients. In the peers list of your BitTorrent client they will show up as “ZipTorrent” and most of the time you will be connected to a bunch of them all originating from similar IP addresses with either 0% or 100% of the file completed.
However, there are blocklists to stop these malicious clients from connecting to your BitTorrent client. Pasted below is a list of the known IP-ranges ZipTorrent is on. The ranges were identified by The Pirate Bay team and are posted in several forums. You might want to add these to the blocklist of your BitTorrent client or PeerGuardian.
There’s one problem though, Media Defender will probably move to new IPs if they read this, a never ending story.
Update: The legitimacy of the screenshot and “ZipTorrent” is doubtful but the IP ranges are correct. Spoofing is not limited to a client like ZipTorrent and I’m told that clients like uTorrent and Azureus are also used to do this job.
ziptorrent:64.62.145.130-64.62.145.165
ziptorrent:65.19.131.0-65.19.131.85
ziptorrent:66.160.133.0-66.160.133.199
ziptorrent:87.117.250.0-87.117.250.150
ziptorrent:216.218.0.100-216.218.184.199
ziptorrent:216.218.190.0-216.218.199.255
ziptorrent:38.99.252.0-38.99.252.255
ziptorrent:38.99.253.1-38.99.253.200
ziptorrent:38.100.24.0-38.100.24.255
ziptorrent:38.100.25.0-38.100.25.255
ziptorrent:38.100.26.0-38.100.26.255
ziptorrent:38.100.134.0-38.100.135.255
ziptorrent:63.216.0.0-63.223.255.255
ziptorrent:64.62.145.0-64.62.145.255
ziptorrent:64.62.214.0-64.62.214.255
ziptorrent:64.93.64.0-64.93.64.255
ziptorrent:65.19.131.0-65.19.131.85
ziptorrent:65.19.143.0-65.19.143.255
ziptorrent:65.120.42.0-65.120.42.255
ziptorrent:66.117.5.0-66.117.5.255
ziptorrent:66.160.133.0-66.160.133.199
ziptorrent:66.160.158.0-66.160.158.255
ziptorrent:66.180.192.0-66.180.207.255
ziptorrent:66.186.192.0-66.186.223.255
ziptorrent:66.198.35.0-66.198.35.255
ziptorrent:81.230.187.01-81.230.187.99
ziptorrent:87.117.250.0-87.117.250.255
ziptorrent:100.0.0.0-115.255.255.255
ziptorrent:129.47.9.0-129.47.9.255
ziptorrent:154.37.0.0-154.37.255.255
ziptorrent:206.80.0.01-206.80.99.99
ziptorrent:207.45.196.0-207.45.196.255
ziptorrent:208.10.23.0-208.10.23.255
ziptorrent:208.10.29.0-208.10.29.255
ziptorrent:209.66.117.0-209.66.117.255
ziptorrent:209.133.121.0-209.151.247.255
ziptorrent:209.133.122.0-209.133.122.255
ziptorrent:209.151.247.0-209.151.247.255
ziptorrent:216.218.0.100-216.218.184.199
ziptorrent:216.218.190.0-216.218.199.255
Previously: Music Industry Gains Hollow Victory Over eDonkey Server
Next: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows leaked to BitTorrent
171 Responses
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You are all slags!! Piracy should be embraced and companies need to figure out a way of using piracy to their advantage. They will never BEAT piracy… the sooner they accept it, the better things will be for everyone.
The dumb fools can’t even see that piracy sells more games than the sales it prevents.
I own hundreds of legitimate CD’s, DVD’s and games. I know at least 60% of them, If I had not seen them first though “PIRACY”, I wouldn’t have ever payed money for them. And would be very bored, with a tiny DVD/CD collection.
That’s WELL OVER £1000 ($2000) worth of media that piracy actually helped to sell. Without it, the industry would be a grand down, cus I would never buy things based on the cover! There’s far too much crap for sale to do that!
Time to get real people.
I think the people uploading things to trackers are like robin hood. They are heros in a very unbalanced world. I think people who are scared of file sharing are just freaking out because they won’t have ways to make money off of other peoples ideas and circumstances anymore. The class divide has been growing but now that is changing because people finally have a way to share without the opressive nature of the corporation getting in the way. It’s a way for the people who weren’t born into riches to have more, learn more, and achieve more. Rich people don’t need any more or lose anything in the process so nobody gives a crap. I’ve bought some games and movies that don’t even work in my players because there is so much DRM crap on them. I’ve actually downloaded games I’ve purchased because the damn things don’t work when you buy them. Besides everyone knows that the true “artists” aren’t the ones getting the money. They usually end up in debt after a record contract. Or game artists end up scrambling for the next contract while the corporation rakes in 100m a month. There aren’t a lot of rich “pirates” out there so good luck in getting anything out of them other than a big waste of your own time and money. It seems dumb to even try to combat things like this. I’m sure “anti-piracy consutants” would tell you differently but then again they’re in a great situation. They can sit there and tell you that they’ll stop piracy and you’ll make more money if you pay them to do this. LOL. Hey that’s awesome. If you’re dumb enough to believe this thing is getting any smaller then right on to them. The “sharing” phenomenon has been growing ever since we could copy a casette tape and it’s only gotten stronger. In fact the more opposition that is thrown at “sharing” the more proficient people become at doing it. All the trolling and media defender type tactics do is to give people more incentive to just do it. People figure that if you’ve got all that time and money to spend paying big consulting firms to fight them then you certainly don’t need our few extra bucks. The federal govt of several companies.. er I mean contries were trying to bust “piracy” groups while osama bin laden was blowing up NewYork. Kinda silly waste of money and time considering the circumstances. I certainly can’t conjure any reason to have sympathy for someone who drives a benz to work and spends all his/her time bitching that they don’t have enough money. Though I think most normal people would give their broke friend a copy of windows considering Bill Gates isnt’ going to go broke over it. Your poor buddy might just get a job if he learns msoffice since he was raised in a country where all the tax money goes to stupid crap like fighting file sharing instead of education. Nobody feels sorry for a corporation.. while “legaly” they might be a person we all know the difference. We’re not customers we’re victims. And until we’re all rich or we’re all poor nothing is going to change. This is bigger than your “law” this is the law of nature. This is the social fabric of humankind seeking ballance and equality. It is, always has been, and always will be, an absurd waste of time to try and fight. Sit back, pick up a hobby, and try to enjoy life before it’s over.
jal you could clone my car and keep it if you have away to clone or copy things i think they should do what they want /wish with it was the person who made the music or file program etc fault they should have protected it better if a musician wrights a song and sings it in public some one hearse it and sings it to what can he do nothing so all this copy right crap is bull
It does more than what you say. I found it on my system dont know how it got there but it was connecting through utorrent to the ziptorrent server on certain torrents and flooding utorrent with its pooh ips. Also when i deleted the torrent file and created another it was still there didn’t even need to be connected to a tracker there was over a thousands ips within a couple of minutes! Also when my client tried to connect to the tracker the tracker was giving me errors saying that ziptorrent wasn’t allowed to be used on that tracker and to get either utorrent or azureus and i was using utorrent! I think it uses legit torrent clients to disguise itself and flood the client with shitty ips so as to not let any downloaders get any data.
Please take down your list, it is clearly FAKE.
some extreme IPs like that can only be seen on internal networks (LAN) and thus if you block it, you block NOBODY in real life, while other IPs might belong to innocent people Media Defender wants taken down, so they fake the IPs.
you morons, didn’t you ever stop to think they would kill two birds with one stone?
ING 239.255.255.250 (239.255.255.250): 56 data bytes
— 239.255.255.250 ping statistics —
4 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss
Aleniums: fake ips…. that would be illegal… you’re the moron or a plant to say the list is ‘FAKE’. Using is has speed up my down loads.
Thanks Peer Guardian!!!!
I think we scared Jai away… I’m already starting to miss him.
I think I can sum up jai in one word: BAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
AT END OF THE DAY THE INTERNET/WEB WAS DESIGNED FOR SHARING AND THATS WHAT WE ARE DOING.. WHO CARES WHAT OTHERS THINK..
LAWS ARE THERE ONLY TO BE BROKEN SO LETS BRAKE THEM WHO CARES.
THIS ZIPPY CLIENT IS JUST A PAIN IN THE BACK SIDE BUT IT STILL DOESNT STOP WHAT WE ARE DOING, SO SCREW THEM!!
YES I KNOW IV USED CAPS BUT IV ONLY JUST NOTICED AND I CANT BE ASSS TO RE-TYPE THIS OUT
My ass hurts so bad cuz I took all your comments up it. It hasn’t felt this bad since I let my conservative club friends take turns shoving their cocks inside. I’m gonna go now and stick some more ice cubes up there to stop the swelling.
i can’t be bothered to read all of your replies and jai-bot’s comments. there comes a time, after three or so of ‘jai’´s comments and three of yours, when I stop reading, and am smart to realize two things and tired of the repetition:
1. jai is paid to post.
2. you are not.
who is wasting their time and money?
who is a tool?
there is a test next thursday.
Wow, that was a waste of 10 mins of my life reading the posts here, I think jai needs to get a life and realize that there is no winning to an argument like this, These kinds of “problems” really are not even problems at all. I work at Crytek as a market analyst for our products. We recently had to pull PC exclusive products because of rampant piracy. Or so says the higher ups, but according to market research we only lost roughly 2% of yearly earnings to piracy. Most of which was well earned because alot of these people came back with useful bug report information and information regarding their system specs and how they stacked against the requirements for games like Crysis.
The big idea is to create a “piracy won against legitimacy” cry in order to rally more against piracy. I actively download files all the time, but I buy what I feel my money should go to, if I like a game so much then I buy it, never trust demos most of the time they usually are completely coded different from the original game. I know this because Crysis’ demo was coded to be much more efficient in performance compared to the retail its a common market strategy. This fight will continue for a long time, as the soldiers march forward new weapons will be made to combat both sides, it is a never ended cycle until a govt steps in to take action fully, even then it will still continue.
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