Torrent site Demonoid is still down a week after DDoS attacks. For good?

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Torrent site Demonoid is still down a week after DDoS attacks. For good?

Demonoid seemed to be the last of the major torrent sites to still be standing, though it’s certainly had its share of troubles. Last week, the site was crippled from a massive DDoS attack… and yet a week later, it still isn’t up. Is this the end for Demonoid?

It turned out, according to a statement supplied to TorrentFreak, that Demonoid had been taken down by a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The site’s administrator reportedly said the fix could take a while, and so the waiting game began. A full week passed, and then last night, the server was turned off completely and the site started serving up a 404 (Not Found error message).

A fake Facebook Page for the Demonoid website said the website was taken down on purpose to work on fixing the issues. I fell for the hoax earlier today and after it was pointed out to me, I immediately tried to contact Demonoid’s administrator for a statement explaining what is really happening.

In the meantime, I’ve been checking the site all day, which kept giving me a 404. About half an hour ago, however, the page loaded something, which in turn redirected to a random website full of advertisements. I tried going to demonoid.me a few more times, and every time it was a different nonsense website. Finally, it seemed to settle on the website you see pictured above. If I tried to keep refreshing, I would eventually get a bogus website again.

All these websites look like the ones you see when you go to a domain that is up for sale or is being kept around for generating ad revenue from random visitors looking for something. For example, if you go to torrents.com or trackers.com, you’ll see something similar. If this is what is happening to demonoid.me, then the owner will likely make quite a bit of money.

The thing is, it doesn’t look as if the owner has changed. The following whois lookup for Demonoid suggests something may have changed last night, although the expiration date is still more than two years from now:

Domain ID:D1703141-ME
Domain Name:DEMONOID.ME
Domain Create Date:28-Nov-2010 23:49:19 UTC
Domain Last Updated Date:31-Jul-2012 12:28:28 UTC
Domain Expiration Date:28-Nov-2014 23:49:19 UTC

Is this really just a consequence of the DDOS attack last week or is there something bigger happening? Is this some kind of anti-piracy initiative? Is Demonoid dead or will the site resurface once again under a different domain (remember, Demonoid originally started at demonoid.com)?

Via