The Pirate Bay Hacked, Users Exposed

An Argentinian hacker successfully hacked his way into the Pirate Bay database. He gained full control over the torrents on the site and he was able to access the IP and email addresses of registered users.

the past TorrentFreak has covered several weaknesses in websites from anti-piracy websites such as the RIAA. However, a recent posting by the Argentinian hacker Ch Russó shows that The Pirate Bay is not invulnerable to such exploits either.

Russó, who claims to be researcher born in Buenos Aires, has published a video that shows how he got into the Pirate Bay admin panel. Here, the hacker could manage all torrents in the site’s database with full admin access. In addition, Russó shows that he had access to sensible user information such as IP-addresses and emails.

TorrentFreak has contacted a Pirate Bay insider who informed us that that several people are currently looking into the issue while the site is offline for upgrades. The downtime is not related to the hack, but it will be used to solve the vulnerabilities. “We decided to rewrite all database-handling anyway, since it was 6 years old,” we were told.

According to our source at The Pirate Bay, who didn’t want to give out too much details at the moment, the hackers were only able to execute the SQL injections after they gained access to the admin panel.

Russó claims that he has no bad intentions and that he merely wants to inform the public that their information is not as secure as they like it to be. A humble goal that is wrongly executed. In the process he exposes several email addresses and other privacy sensitive information that is clearly visible in the video.

Although the information obtained by Russó might be worth a few bucks to some interested anti-piracy outfits, he has no plans to sell any of the information to any third parties.

"Probably these groups would be very interested in this information, but we are not [trying] to sell it," Russó told KrebsOnSecurity. "Instead we wanted to tell people that their information may not be so well protected."

The Pirate Bay folks on the other hand are confident that the problem will be fixed during the current downtime period. They further assured us that it was impossible for the hackers to find out the true passwords of the site’s users.


Hacking The Pirate Bay