A series of attacks on The Pirate Bay, one of the most well known and controversial file-sharing websites has allowed a group of Argentinian hackers, headed by malware researcher Ch Russo, to access both the user database and the website administration panel of The Pirate Bay, comprising over 4 million usernames and email addresses in the process.

It is thought that the group first targeted the website administration panel on The Pirate Bay, the group succeeded and then employed a series of SQL injection vulnerabilities to gain access to the user database, where they were able to add and amend records and obtain information to identify trackers and torrents uploaded by specific users.

Ch Russo posted a cryptic message on his blog detailing reasons behind the attack:

As any other website, as any other system or mechanism, www.thepiratebay.org has robust parts and soft spots. We beleive that the people behind this comunity always acted with the local laws on their side, and so have we. The community caused problems to huge companies and corporations which turned into threats between this companies and them. What we have done, we did not do it with anger, or for commercial value. As always, we saw the change, the moment and decided to take it. The protocol or procedure done to achieve this wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.

As you can see, Russo acknowledges that the data would be of huge interest to anti-piracy groups like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). In a telephone interview with KrebsOnSecurity he said: “Probably these groups would be very interested in this information, but we are not [trying] to sell it,” adding “Instead we wanted to tell people that their information may not be so well protected.”

According to Softpedia, the attackers have not been in contact with The Pirate Bay administrators since the attack but the offending weakness has since been identified and patched.

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