The fight against the torrent trackers distributing or boosting illegal material on the Internet is now making new victims. After two top players, TorrentSpy and Demonoid, were shut down, IsoHunt also bites the dust but only partially. The founder of the technology announced that IsoHunt becomes unavailable for the US consumers due to a lawsuit started by Motion Picture Assoc. of America. In case you don't know, MPAA filed a complaint last year against TorrentSpy and IsoHunt, accusing the two services of distributing pirated content. As part of the lawsuit, the plaintiff demanded private information about the users who accessed the two websites but both defendants refused to do so straight from the beginning.

In order to avoid complying with the demands, IsoHunt took the decision to shut down the website in the United States because as long as the local users do not access the page, there is no private information about them. However, this is an important hit for IsoHunt as many of its consumers were US-based.

"As of earlier today, we have disabled access from users in the US to our trackers, until further notice. This goes for ALL trackers we run. This is due to the US's hostility towards P2P technologies, and we feel with our current lawsuit brought by the MPAA, we can no longer ensure your security and privacy in the US. So, if you're outside the US, you may notice less peers," the official page of IsoHunt now states.

What's more important is that this outage is already exploited by several malicious users who tried to make some easy cash using IsoHunt. According to the official page of the torrent search engine, some spammers sent numerous emails to the users of the service demanding to donate some money for IsoHunt. "Don't use the link! The page that loads has some very nasty popups, at least one of which has a malware payload. We noticed it because their spam has been bouncing for the recipients that no longer exist, and I'd estimate that they sent out at least a few thousand of these," the message reads.