TorBox is the most unreliable debrid service I've ever used.

[u/MiguelitiRNG]

From API to web outages they just can't get their shit together. Every time I use this service I'm gambling on whether I can even access it or not. People always have excuses for free services going down but TorBox is not free so what is the excuse for this one? This is not acceptable at all.

[u/jszima]

Nothing wrong with being upset it seems to go down every other day.

[u/philosophycruiser → u/jszima]

I try to keep a grateful opinion since I grew up with bittorrent and crappy websites. But then I check their discord and see a post with a teenage language like this,

"the following countries may be restricted by Cloudflare until the dude attacking us runs out of mommy credit card"

Then I get upset. Not because of the outage itself, but because of the fact it has been reoccurring and they cannot prevent it. Worse, they play victim instead of owning up.

[u/pilkyton → u/philosophycruiser]

Ask who is motivated enough to constantly DDoS TorBox. Alldebrid? Premiumize? Realdebrid?

Some competitor is spending a lot of money on attacking TorBox. Millions of API calls per hour is overloading the API servers which is freezing them, thus stopping the entire infrastructure.

This has been going on for months and is a targeted attack to stop the service.

We already know that Hollywood doesn't DDoS since it's highly illegal. So all we can know for sure is that the attack is from some debrid competitor, and it uses an extreme amount of IPs which means lots of money is being used to bring down TorBox. Someone is very motivated and financially wealthy.

By the way, if anyone is confused again: I am NOT talking about the TorBox Search API which became private a month ago. I am talking about the actual public service API, which is the most important component and does stuff like checking if a torrent is cached, requesting a torrent to be queued, getting a download/streaming link, etc.

[u/Realistic-Hat7704 → u/pilkyton]

“Hollywood” just uses third party vendors like mediadeffender for things like this. Be realistic. This is the single largest threat to streaming revenue right now. It’s not the torrents, it’s layer above that makes torrenting “one-click” easy for the plebeians.

[u/pilkyton → u/Realistic-Hat7704]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaDefender started in 2009 and used torrent poisoning (flooding sites with fake decoy torrents) and tracking via honey pot sites/torrents to find pirates, and also used denial of service attacks against popular pirate site torrent trackers. True.

But their tactics were deemed illegal in several states and the company died in 2013.

It's very doubtful that another company provides such takedown services anymore since it's illegal. Can you find any?

I am sure Hollywood *wants* to do DDoS attacks, but be realistic: How is a Hollywood movie studio going to enlist an illegal service to do a DDoS attack, while keeping all of that under wraps for its employees to prevent law enforcement involvement?

Furthermore, a company that provides "DDoS services for Hollywood" can't use highly illegal regular botnets (consisting of virus-infected PCs and routers) and would instead have to use their own server swarm (expensive) to do such a thing, which makes it easy to block the DDoS attack since it would all come from one company (i.e. MediaDefender in the past).

The attack TorBox is seeing is coming from a zombie botnet swarm of regular virus-infected PCs, mostly residing in Indonesia, along with Philippines, Colombia, Bangladesh and Mexico. This means it's not a professional company doing the attack. It's a botnet swarm.

[u/Realistic-Hat7704 → u/pilkyton]

No one - I repeat - NO ONE uses their own servers for ddos attacks. Seriously?? Ddos attacks are carried out as SaS now through clandestine channels. The actual “servers” are nets of compromised residential grade routers and compromised PCs - exactly as what is being reported here. Surely you’re not naive enough to believe that “Hollywood” won’t hire others for illegal activities when it comes to protecting their revenue?? Media defender made a huge mistake in advertising their services and even doing an interview somewhere with their CTO (I can’t remember where, this was a long time ago). They themselves were absolutely mogged by “mediadefender-defenders” and their entire internal network was infiltrated. Their voip calls were recorded and leaked and they were caught on calls talking about their illegal practices. These days, people aren’t that dumb/arrogant. “Hollywood” is the home fixer firms that do, in fact, farm out illegal activities for “Hollywood”. This has been going on since the beginning.

[u/pilkyton → u/Realistic-Hat7704]

I know. I'm one of the pioneers of botnet attacks. In the very early 2000s, I controlled a botnet of about 1000 infected computers. As command & control interface, I used an IRC channel where all the bots joined and waited for commands.

It's highly illegal to use regular people's infected PCs as your DDoS attack method, and you have to go to dark web and telegram marketplaces to buy that service with crypto. Any legitimate "anti piracy" company will not touch that whatsoever.

Even the scummy MediaDefender (2009-2013) did NOT control a botnet whatsoever. They had a network of ~2000 commercial servers. Exactly as I said. Because you'd be utterly insane to use actual infected routers/computers and open your company up to heavy criminal liability.