Demonoid Taken Down By Ukrainian Government; Domains For Sale

In late July, the BitTorrent website Demonoid was taken down after what seemed to be a DDoS attack, but the story now seems to be more elaborate and political. The site was removed from its Ukrainian server around the time of Deputy Prime Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky's diplomatic trip to the United States.

When users couldn't access Demonoid, it was reported that the failure was a result of a distributed denial of service, a measure taken to target one system with multiple compromised systems, usually infected with a Trojan, causing a denial of service attack. Torrent Freak says reports coming out of Ukraine, where Demonoid is hosted, are that the DDoS isn't all that's going on here and "the site has been busted by the authorities."

Demonoid is hosted on ColoCALL, which is the largest data center in Ukraine. During the DDoS attack, Ukranian government investigators went to ColoCALL to shut down Demnoid.

"Investigators have copied all the information from the servers Demonoid and sealed them," an anonymous ColoCall source told Torrent Freak. "Some equipment was not seized, but now it does not work, and we were forced to terminate the agreement with the site."

"Demonoid was a leading global player in digital music piracy which acted as unfair competition to the more than 500 licensed digital music services that offer great value music to consumers while respecting the rights of artists, songwriters and record companies," Jeremy Banks, director of anti-piracy for the IFPI, said in a statement according to CNet. "The operation to close Demonoid was a great example of international cooperation to tackle a service that was facilitating the illegal distribution of music on a vast scale."

With Khoroshkovsky making his way to the United States, Ukrainian officials decided that it was the time to make good on promises made to the American government. Torrent Freak asserts that Ukraine assured the U.S. that "it would improve its attitude and efforts towards enforcing copyright and no doubt its Western partner will be very pleased indeed that Demonoid's head has been presented on a platter."

The site isn't running as of Tuesday, and CNet reports that three of its previously used domain names have gone up for sale. Demonoid.me, demonoid.com, and demonoid.ph were all available for sale on Sedo as of Sunday.

The DDoS attack on Demonoid isn't the first of its kind. Demonoid has disappeared and come back from similar attacks in the past, but it has never been part of an international movement to stop piracy in order to appease the U.S. government, where the the MPAA and RIAA consider it a major threat.