After the authorities took out KAT.cr and Torrentz.eu , they are now going for the end user clients.
Unknown attackers are sabotaging popular TV and movie torrents by flooding swarms 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.
In short the process works as follows. The attacker joins a popular torrent swarm with hundreds, if not thousands of IPv6 addresses. These fake peers request data from real downloaders, quickly filling up their request queues.
The fake peers never exchange any data but keep the client busy until they are banned.
The attack has been confirmed to affect the popular client uTorrent. After a few minutes uTorrent does ban the malicious peers, but this makes little difference as the attackers use so many different IP-addresses.
Because all the fake peers have filled up the connection slots, real peers can no longer connect. This means that hardly any real data is transferred.
Switching to a different client such as Vuze, Transmission or qBittorrent is one way to beat the attack.
For torrents search engines I’m currently using ExtraTorrents.cc and TPB. Who knows how much longer these sites will be operational. For those looking for a YIFY archive visit https://yts.ag/