Popular Torrents Being Sabotaged by ipv6 Peer Flood

Torrenting, a rather simple method of sharing files between several computers over the internet.

Unknown attackers are sabotaging popular TV and movie torrents by flooding them with IPv6 peers. The vulnerability, which affects the popular uTorrent client, makes it nearly impossible for torrent users to download files. It’s unclear who’s orchestrating the attacks, but it could be a guerrilla anti-piracy move.

BitTorrent is a highly robust sharing protocol that is not easily disrupted. However, there have been some crazy efforts to stop people from torrenting some of the latest movie and popular torrents. It seems as though the technique for sabotaging uses ipv6 to overwhelm BitTorrent swarms.

Because it is focussed on the Ipv6 protocol, not all users are affected. These fake peers request data from the downloaders torrent client and very quickly fill up the request queues. The fake peers never actually transmit any data but keep your client busy and prevent it from downloading torrents.

uTorrent seems to be the client that is affected, after a few mins of the requests, the application does block the fake clients IP but makes very little difference as they will be using so many addresses.

“This new method of peer flooding makes a lot of people think there are issues with torrents. From an anti-piracy point of view it is achieving the purposed effect,” the tracker operator, who prefers to remain anonymous, said.

Could this be a clever attempt at stopping torrenting? Who knows.

Thank you to TorrentFreak for providing us with this information.