Piracy: this torrent site changed its address nearly 40 times to escape the authorities

The Spanish platform DonTorrent, which reportedly has millions of monthly visitors, was able to survive throughout 2023 by changing its domain name almost every week.

For several years, rights holders and authorities have been waging a merciless war against pirate sites with relative success. Indeed, while illegal downloading has decreased significantly over the last decade, the trend seems to be on the rise since 2020.

If the fragmentation of the legal offer and an unfavorable economic situation can explain this situation, it should also be noted that pirates seem increasingly better organized to respond to actions taken against them.

39 new domain names in 2023

Do you know the YggTorrent URL by heart? Probably not, because the French pirate site, which emerged after the disappearance of T411, regularly changes its domain name. Indeed, he is frequently the target of complaints, which lead to his address being blocked by internet service providers, or even to its delisting.

However, changing your domain name is not very complicated, and platforms like YggTorrent and DonTorrent do not hesitate to do it. The latter has even become an expert on the subject, since she changed her address 39 times during the year 2023.

The Spanish site is particularly targeted by local authorities, with whom it has played cat and mouse on numerous occasions this year, sometimes even every week. A situation which does not seem to reduce its traffic, because its administrators report millions of visitors each month, with peaks observed when streaming platforms increase their prices.

A well-oiled maneuver, but not without risk

Why do the measures taken by the authorities do not seem to work with DonTorrent? On the one hand, the administrators of the latter are reactive: “ We do not have domain names pending and ready to use, we register them the same day we see the block “, they declare. On the other hand, an official channel on Telegram allows more than 80,000 subscribers to be quickly informed of address changes. And, in the worst case, the site has a .onion domain to be accessible on the Tor network.

However, this situation is not safe for users. Without a stable URL, it can be difficult to know if the site you’re on is the one you’re looking for. Some scammers have spotted the right opportunity by creating imitations of sites like YggTorrent or DonTorrent, with the sole aim of recovering the banking information of poorly informed victims. The authorities are communicating more and more on this aspect to discourage Internet users.

Another problem, less serious, linked to the regular change of URL: certain antivirus publishers tend to block the latest addresses of the Spanish site. “ The funny thing is that they apologize when we complain about these false positives, but they can’t explain what happened “, explains DonTorrent. “ They remove blocks, but only if we inform them. » Algorithms could be to blame, according to our colleagues at TorrentFreaksounding the alarm when they notice a sudden increase in traffic on a newly created domain name.

In any case, if DonTorrent and YggTorrent successfully survive the measures put in place by the authorities, other platforms do not experience the same fate, like FileWarez which shut down last month. Rights holders are not done with pirate sites, and all means will always be good to counter them.

Source : TorrentFreak