Writers Note: This piece is a followup to one I wrote yesterday but got published today. It presents new information about yesterday’s massive DDoS attack on The Pirate Bay (TPB). If you haven’t read the first article, I recommend you do so before reading this one.
The Pirate Bay, one of the internet’s largest torrent sites and one of its most vocal advocates for intellectual property reform, fell prey to a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack yesterday. Representatives from The Pirate Bay proudly announced on their Facebook page that TPB is “back in full effect”, and, indeed, the website is up and in good working order.
Yesterday, speculation about who was responsible for the attack was rampant. Although I made a convincing case for why Anonymous may be responsible for the attack, Anons everywhere tweeted their solidarity to The Pirate Bay. TBP assured supporters that Anonymous is not behind the attack and urged them to spread rumors. The BBC even quoted a network security expert who agreed that it likely wasn’t a concerted Anonymous attack. A quote:
It could be the record labels, or a government somewhere that has had enough of not being able to catch The Pirate Bay, it could be just one person who had rented some cloud power from Amazon and is sitting in a cafe, and is able to launch an attack.
He wasn’t so far off the mark. New evidence points to a former member of Anonymous, who tweets @AnonNyre, as the culprit for the DDoS attack.
It all started with a couple of tweets:
[1] The Pirate Bay, I am so f***ing pissed, WHY THERE IS NO ANAL PORN IN HERE. F*** YOU PIRATE BAY.
[2] F*** that s***, N**** Bay.
Two minutes later:
[3] Tango Down – thepiratebay.se – The Reason –http://pastebin.com/j0PLqynP
@YourAnonNews@AnonOpUK@Anon_Central@MalSec
And then he posted his reasoning to Pastebin:
I am Nyre. I am highly against Anonymous. I do not support Anonymous anymore. I sometimes help the feds.
The Pirate Bay was a press-release website for Anonymous, then I had a idea, why not take it down? Why not make it impossible for Anonymous?
Get on your knees, Anonymous. I am a one-man army. I am not a hacker. I am a security killer.
Expect yourself, f******.
So, it looks like Nyre did not attack The Pirate Bay due to a dearth of his preferred pornography, but rather because, as he sees it, The Pirate Bay acted as a mouthpiece for Anonymous. It’s unclear what he means by this.
It’s also unclear how he pulled off such a massive attack, though it’s likely he commandeered a botnet of considerable size to do so. Nyre did not mention Wikileaks, which was also under a DDoS attack yesterday.
Whether The Pirate Bay releases more details about the logistics of the attack remains, like so much of this story, unclear.
Of course, we will update you as this story continues to develop.
