The Pirate Bay hit by DDoS attack

File-sharing website The Pirate Bay (TPB) has been hit by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

The site has been largely inaccessible for the last 24 hours, and the service is intermittent in the UK.

The Pirate Bay has confirmed the attack on its Facebook page, saying that it did not know who was behind it, although it "had its suspicions".

A provider of DDoS defence systems said that it was unlikely that the attack came from hacking group Anonymous.

"There will be further attacks, but what's significant about this whole story is that people think that it is the Anonymous attacking a site which is typically a type of site that they defend," said Andre Stewart of Corero Network Security.

"It could be the record labels, or a government somewhere that has had enough of not being able to catch The Pirate Bay, it could be just one person who had rented some cloud power from Amazon and is sitting in a cafe, and is able to launch an attack."

Although some users may have attempted to access the site using proxies, TPB itself warned them against doing so.

Illegal file sharing

"Use proxies at own risk. Don't login unless you trust the proxy supplier. Don't freak out. You'll get your TPB fix tomorrow," said the site.

:story: BBC News