Kickass hit by DDoS as latest Pirate Bay domain is blocked

By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 18 January 2016

Now, you often find us sitting here in the Legal News section reporting on downtime over at The Pirate Bay.

But we all know that you, as a responsible CMU reader, aren’t really concerned when the infamous file-sharing platform goes offline. Because you get all your nicked music and movies from KickassTorrents. Sorry, I mean, you respect copyright, and the creative and commercial investment artists, actors, labels and studios make to entertain your minds, and would never dream of circumventing a web-block and doing some piracy.

Anyway, in recent days it has been KickassTorrents – the world’s most visited torrent site (apparently, I don’t know what a torrent is, I get all my entertainment from legit suppliers like Sainsbury’s) – that’s all wobbly.

The site was offline on a number of occasions because of one of those fashionable DDoS attacks. The piracy service’s operators confirmed to Torrentfreak that its DNS servers had been targeted by the attack, adding that they were busy trying to resolve the issue. The service is seemingly back online this morning, though has gone back up and then back down again since the DDoS began.

Meanwhile, back at the old Pirate Bay, its latest domain has already been suspended. As previously reported, having had all six of the domain names it activated last year blocked by the respective domain registries, the Bay made thepiratebay.ms its primary address earlier this month. The Montserratian domain registry responded by blocking it almost immediately.

The piracy site has switched to numerous new domains in recent years fearing its original .se and .org web addresses would be seized or blocked. Though ironically pretty much every domain except .se and .org has been taken, with those two still operational.