In recent weeks many Pirate Bay users have received an email, allegedly sent by The Pirate Bay team, encouraging them to download a course on how to make money from the site. The email is clearly sent by spammers, but since this is not the first time the Pirate Bay user database has been exploited, users are starting to worry how it's possible that their personal info is leaking out again.

Last summer a group of Argentinian hackers gained access to The Pirate Bay’s admin panel through a security breach. At the time, the hackers stated that they didn’t want to exploit the vulnerability, and merely wanted to show that the system was vulnerable.

The Pirate Bay team informed TorrentFreak that they were doing all they could to patch the vulnerability, and later said that the site was fully secure again. Two month later, however, it became apparent that The Pirate Bay backend had been exploited, this time by spammers.

At the time a large number of The Pirate Bay users received an email, allegedly from the site’s operators, inviting them to join the private BitTorrent tracker DemUnoid. The emails were sent out using a unique combination of real Pirate Bay user names and the email addresses those people signed up with, indicating that the sender had exploited the user database.

How this happened, and whether there was a connection to the earlier hack attempt remained a mystery, but it has now become apparent that this spam attempt was not an isolated incident.

Starting mid-February TorrentFreak started receiving reports of another spam attempt. This time Pirate Bay users are being encouraged to visit a website where they can allegedly download instructions on how to make money from torrent sites like The Pirate Bay.

Below is a copy of one of the original emails. A slightly edited version was sent out as recently as yesterday.

—

Subject: Attention to all PirateBay Users

Dear *Username*

A course has been put together to show you how to use The PirateBay to make some serious money. This seriously works.

Please visit http://www.sams101.com/ccount/click.php?XXX

and download the course instructions. Because you are a torrent user and you use TPB you can do this.

Pirate Team

—

The staff at The Pirate Bay are definitely not sending out these emails, so from where do they originate? As far as we can see it appears to be another exploit of a vulnerability in The Pirate Bay user database, one that is used for malicious purposes. Another possibility is that the same people are reusing the previously obtained data.

The emails that TorrentFreak has seen all follow the same structure and link to the same page. They are sent from various addresses such as [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected] and all use the unique combination of a Pirate Bay username and email address of the user in question.

One Pirate Bay user who received the spam email told TorrentFreak that he only used the email the spam was sent to once, to sign up at The Pirate Bay, which is a clear sign that the spam results from a compromised user database. How this info was collected is unclear at this point, and from the information we have it appears that only a subset of users is affected.

During recent weeks users have mentioned the spam mails at the Pirate Bay forums, but no official explanation has been given thus far. With nearly 5 million users The Pirate Bay database is a lucrative target for spammers so new users should be weary of this and if possible use a throwaway email address when signing up.

A Pirate Bay moderator told TorrentFreak that users who want to change their email address can ask for it on IRC or at the forums. An option to let users change their email addresses on the site is being considered.