Almost 9 years have past from the last huge raid of the Swedish police that took down The Pirate Bay for 3 days! This was the largest time that the website went offline, causing panic in the file-sharing world, but everything indicates that this record, unfortunately, will be replaced by a new one soon…
In Tuesday 9/12/2014 the police raided a (nuclear-proof!) data center in Nacka, Stockholm, that caused TPB to dissapear offline, while anti-piracy group Rights Alliance took responsibility for the complaint that caused this action.
Although a lot of rumors started to go around, that The Pirate Bay is online again but using different domain names (thepiratebay.cr, thepiratebay.ee, thepiratebay.mobi), none of these claims seem to be true and no one really knows if TPB will be online again. If it does though, it will be in the same domain (thepiratebay.se)
How this happend?
Especially after the last raid, TPB took extra measures in case something similar happened. Most of TPB’s operation moved to the cloud , while running 21 virtual machines on several commercial cloud hosting providers.
TPB had stated some time a go that:
All communication with users goes through TPB’s load balancer, which is a disk-less server with all the configuration in RAM. The load balancer is not in the same country as the transit-router or the cloud servers.
The communication between the load balancer and the virtual servers is encrypted. So even if a cloud provider found out they’re running TPB, they can’t look at the content of user traffic or user’s IP-addresses.
If the police decide to raid us again there are no servers to take, just a transit router. If they follow the trail to the next country and find the load balancer, there is just a disk-less server there. In case they find out where the cloud provider is, all they can get are encrypted disk-images.
The site’s load balancer was indeed one of the remaining bottlenecks for TPB. However, this means that the VMs are probably up and running and if a properly configured loadbalancer is put in place, TPB will come alive again (that’s in theory of course).
At the moment no one knows what hardware exactly was seezed by the police and when/if TPB will get online again. The only thing we can do now is wait and see…