One of the world's leading Pirate Bay proxy sites has been battling a crippling DDoS attack this week. Since Wednesday, the reverse proxy service operated by the UK Pirate Party has been under assault, rendering the service inaccessible to many of its users. The site they aim to facilitate access to - The Pirate Bay itself - has also been under attack. Both sites are fighting back and are determined to come out on top.

With the emergence of Anonymous-style activist groups in recent years, the DDoS attack has proven a popular way to not only voice dissent but also take away opponents’ freedom of speech.

But while some may find it entertaining to watch government and corporate websites collapse under the onslaught of tens of thousands of angry LOICs, this is a knife that cuts both ways and increasingly torrent sites are at the sharp end.

Suffering more than its fair share of attacks is The Pirate Bay. In mid-May the site collapsed under a huge denial of service assault after it (maybe coincidentally) criticized elements of the ‘Anonymous’ collective for carrying out a DDoS attack on Virgin Media, the first local ISP to follow court orders and block access to The Pirate Bay.

But while Virgin was DDoS’d for blocking access to The Pirate Bay, it is now the turn of the UK Pirate Party to pay the price for facilitating access to the infamous torrent site.

Although it is favored by UK citizens looking to circumvent the local ISP blockade against TPB, the reverse proxy operated by PPUK is used by people all over the world. But since Wednesday the site has been largely unavailable.

“We were hit by a DDoS at about 22:00 on the 29th,” PPUK’s Harry Percival told TorrentFreak.

The proxy had been hit before but this time things were different. Previous attacks were directed towards the site’s main IP but this time the target was PPUK’s main hostname. PPUK were in the middle of a new project when the attackers struck.

“We had been testing geographically aware DNS as part of an on going project, and have

different IPs for the UK and worldwide,” Percival explained.

However, due to the attack PPUK’s upstream provider blocked several of the IP addresses being utilized by the proxy. Yesterday all IPv4 addresses were blocked but now service is being restored and the site is returning to normal. IPv6 addresses remained online throughout and were not affected by the DDoS.

The Pirate Party informs TorrentFreak they are working with their provider to mitigate the issue and are also looking into advanced anti-DDoS technology to fight any future attacks.

After they launched the Pirate Bay proxy service the PPUK website was shot into the big time. In early May the site was ranked outside the top 100,000 most-visted websites in the UK. Three weeks into that same month Alexa listed it as the UK’s 1,550th most popular website.

Today their popularity sits at an all-time high. According to Alexa, pirateparty.org.uk is now the UK’s 255th most popular web location.

Separately, although of course there is the possibility that they are connected, The Pirate Bay has been battling a DDoS of their own this week. A site insider informs TorrentFreak that they have upgraded their pipes and can now easily fend off the attack.

In late July, Demonoid famously suffered a crippling DDoS attack, one that preceded its total shutdown. No one knows for sure if the events are connected, but fingers have been pointed at variety of suspects from the international music industry to the Russian mafia.

You can check if the Pirate Party Pirate Bay Proxy is back online for you by clicking here.