Month: April 2020

Absurde Akrobatik von Interessenverbänden, die Coronavirus-Pandemie zu instrumentalisieren

Once upon a time, prolonged downtime at The Pirate Bay was greeted by wails of concern. Many of the site’s users would naturally presume the worst, that the site had been raided and shut down once again.

In recent years, however, persistent downtime has been a common occurrence that has gradually become the norm. That’s quite possibly a result of the pressure the site finds itself under on a daily basis, i.e constantly ensuring that it doesn’t succumb to the kinds of raids and anti-piracy actions that have hindered it in the past.

That being said, over the last several weeks downtime for regular users has been considerable. While mainly accessible via its .onion address via the Tor network, the clear web variant of the site only returned this week after roughly a month of downtime.

Nevertheless, the return wasn’t straightforward. While anyone with a basic browser setup could access the site as normal, some with a less basic setup – especially in respect of security measures – still had problems accessing the site. Users of the security software MalwareBytes were prevented from accessing any torrents whatsoever, for example.

The problem lay in The Pirate Bay’s setup. Aside from cosmetic changes to some pages, the site sends requests to another domain (apibay.org) in order to present torrents to the user on thepiratebay.org. However, those accessing the main domain with Malwarebytes installed were greeted with blank torrent pages after the security software blocked apibay.org.

Any warning of this type, especially concerning trojans, should be of concern to users of any site. However, dumping trojans on users hasn’t been the modus operandi of The Pirate Bay thus far, so TorrentFreak contacted Malwarebytes to find out what was causing the alert.

Manager of WebProtection Labs at MalwareBytes Andres Ortiz informs TorrentFreak that the issue was caused by the presence of “a few” cryptocurrency miners, not on thepiratebay.org, but on a sub-directory of apibay.org, the domain from where TPB appears to present its torrent results. The analysis for just one example miner is shown below.

After examining the apibay.org domain once again, MalwareBytes has now confirmed that the miners have been removed so in response, they will push an update to their users to stop TPB’s indexes from being blocked moving forward. However, if any party reintroduces the miners, it’s certainly possible that the site will be rendered inaccessible once again.

The Pirate Bay first introduced a coin miner back in 2017 as a way to generate additional revenue. At the time it was estimated it could potentially generate around $12,000 per month from users’ CPU cycles.

Drom: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also have an annual VPN review.

Eine der interessantesten Custom-ROM-Schmieden meldet sich mit einer auf Android 10 basierenden neuen Version zurück. (Paranoid Android, Sony)

In der neuesten Beta-Version von MacOS 10.15.5 hat Apple eine Funktion zur Schonung des Akkus eingebaut. iOS-Nutzer kennen das schon. (MacOS 10.15 Catalina, iOS)

Der kalifornische Generalstaatsanwalt hat starke Bedenken an dem geplanten Transfer. Die Icann gibt sich deshalb nun mehr Zeit. (Icann, DNS)

Der Kampf um die Versammlungsfreiheit wird nun breiter geführt, ein kleiner Sieg wurde beim Verfassungsgericht errungen. Derweil verbreitet die Berliner Polizei unwahres über ihre repressiven Einsätze

Ionenantriebe für Satelliten werden künftig in der Lüneburger Heide entwickelt. (DLR, Technologie)

Tesla hat den Bauantrag für seine Fabrik in Grünheide überarbeitet. Wegen seiner Änderungen muss er erneut öffentlich ausgelegt werden. (Gigafactory Berlin, Technologie)

Ein Forscher konnte über PC-Lüfter Daten ausleiten. Das mag kaum praxistauglich sein, aber es zeigt die große Bandbreite an Angriffsmöglichkeiten. (Datensicherheit, Malware)

Die globale Ökonomie saust in den Keller und China wird diesmal kein Rettungsnetz aufspannen können