Hacker Gains Access to The Pirate Bay's User Database

Posted 07/08/2010 at 3:44pm | by Pulkit Chandna

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A young Argentinian hacker, known only by his sobriquet Ch Russo, claims to have successfully slipped past The Pirate Bay's defenses, gaining access to the torrent site's administrative control panel. An SQL injection vulnerability discovered by Ch Russo and a couple of his chums exposed the site's user database, which is said to contain account information belonging to around 4 million users. However, the hacker denies altering or deleting information.

The trio also resisted the temptation of selling the data to the companies assisting the entertainment industry in its fight against piracy. “Probably these groups would be very interested in this information, but we are not [trying] to sell it,” Russo told security blog KrebsOnSecurity in a phone interview. “Instead we wanted to tell people that their information may not be so well protected.”

After Russo convinced KrebsOnSecurity's Brian Krebs that he had indeed hacked the popular torrent site, the security blogger made repeated attempts to contact the site's administrators, but all in vain. While it did not answer Kreb's request for a comment, TPB later said that the issue has been fixed.

Image Credit: KrebOnSecurity