Topic: Pirate Bay says stolen database safe

[Amker]

PEER-TO-PEER SITE Pirate Bay has reassured users that the security breach which saw hackers making off with its entire database of 1.6m user names and passwords has been resolved and the stolen data uncompromised.
Pirate Bay co-founder, Peter Sunde, told The INQUIRER, the marauders had picked up on a glitch in its blog software late on Thursday, but had quickly dumped the data after realising they'd been rumbled.

"There was a stupid coding error and they found a hole in the blog software which they exploited through a SQL injection," Sunde said, but insisted he wasn't going to "rat them out".

"As soon as they put it onto the net, I rang them up and let them know we knew who'd done it. They told us they got a copy of all the user names and the encrypted passwords but they couldn't crack it," he claimed.

"They realised they had done something stupid and disposed of all the data," he said, implying it was a group of youngsters who were out to impress but "afraid of a backlash" from more 'senior' groups.

Initial reports in the local Swedish press had suggested the perpetrators were a Swedish hacker group known as Arga Unga Hackare (AUH) – that's Angry Young Hackers to you and me – which gained notoriety for hacking Sweden's biggest anti-piracy organisation in 2005.

But Sunde denied the reports, saying there were, "a lot of people on the Swedish hacker scene who were looking for attention".

"People try to hack us every day. We always expect the worst so we encrypt information – even in the database.

Under a posting entitled "User data stolen but not unsecured" Pirate Bay on Friday admitted to the breach but said the stolen passwords were all encrypted.

Pirate Bay, which calls itself "the world's largest Bittorrent tracker", was set up in Sweden in 2004 by founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij.

Swedish police raided Pirate Bay's HQ last year and confiscated its servers, but since then, the site has started distributing its servers and bandwidth to other locations to avoid the possibility of another raid, Sunde said in an interview with Forbes.com earlier this month.

 INQUIRER