Demonoid owners under criminal investigation
By Emil Protalinski for Zero Day | August 7, 2012 -- 22:49 GMT (15:49 PDT)
Summary: Demonoid, one of the biggest torrent sites, was taken down on July 25 by a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Ukrainian officials then made sure the servers remained inaccessible, and now the owners are reportedly under criminal investigation in Mexico.
Demonoid's owners are under criminal investigation in Mexico, where at least one of the site's administrator's was previously rumored to be. We learned just yesterday that Demonoid was busted by Ukrainian authorities who had a talk with ColoCall, the largest datacenter in Ukraine, in the middle of last week.
Last month, a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack brought the site to its knees. Last week, the server was turned off completely and the site led to a dead end. Then it came back to life and started redirecting to random sites full of advertisements. Eventually this stopped and both demonoid.me and demonoid.ph went dead again.
Sergei Burlakov, the Deputy Head of press service at Ukraine's Ministry of Internal Affairs, told Kommersant that the police itself did not have to use force to convince the hosting provider ColoCall. Here is a rough translation of his statement from Russian courtesy of Google Translate, with some grammar fixes:
"The Department of Economic Crimes received an international commission of inquiry from Interpol to send to ColoCall. The owners of Demonoid are being prosecuted in Mexico and the tracker is accused of copyright infringement. We sent a request to the provider, after which the company itself decided not to work with Demonoid."
This action all apparently started a long time ago. In October 2011, authorities carried out a raid in Monterrey, Mexico, with the aim of arresting one of Demonoid's staff and blocking access to the site in the country, according to TorrentFreak. They were reportedly successful.
It's looking less and less likely that Demonoid's administrator will be able to bring the site back one day, as promised. Then again, we're talking about Demonoid, which doesn't seem interested in calling it quits, much like The Pirate Bay.
