Fake Facebook pages and malware-serving sites cripple the site’s reputation

Aug 3, 2012 10:47 GMT  ·  By

A distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack that hit Demonoid – one of the most popular torrent sites in the world - has taken its toll. The site is currently down, but in the past couple of days its visitors have been redirected to all sorts of shady ad sites.

Usually, DDOS attacks take out a website for short periods. However, in this case, things seem to be more complicated.

“It started as a DDoS but then it caused a series of problems. These problems need to be fixed before the site can go back up, and it’s a complicated fix this time,” the administrator of Demonoid told TorrentFreak on July 27.

Since then, the problems started building up. First, a week after the site went down, an “official” Facebook page was created. The shady page attracted a lot of attention after its owners started posting status updates in which they claimed to be working on getting the site back on track.

However, after being exposed by TorrentFreak, they changed their tune and denied running Demonoid.

On August 2, things got even worse. Users who attempted to access demonoid.me were redirected to an ad network which in some cases served malicious advertisements.

According to the site’s admin, the large amount of traffic generated by the DDOS attack has had a great impact on the bandwidth bills, which is why the redirection was set in place.

While Demonoid’s owner promises to bring the service back on track, many users are starting to wonder if this is the end of the popular website.

On the other hand, the BitTorrent site is known for shutting down its activity for long periods. So, is this the end of Demonoid or just another break? We’ll probably find out soon enough.

In the meantime, be sure to avoid illegitimate Demonoid-related news sources and shady “official” webpages.