Researchers uncover the location of the Pirate Bay uploaders

Researchers Expose Locations of Pirate Bay Uploaders

( source )
As part of the research, information was published about individuals and groups of individuals who downloaded torrent files on The Pirate Bay . The data shows that most of the torrent files were downloaded from the United States (in most cases, IPs led to Comcast and Road Runner Internet service providers). The researchers also stated that they had identified the “top 100” applausers and their approximate location.

Personal data security is a sore point for the Internet. And especially for BitTorrent networks. Anyone who does not take action to hide his IP address , leaves a noticeable informational trail.

Sites such as YouHaveDownloaded and MyPiracy have shown that it is quite easy to maintain a database of downloads tied to an IP address. And it can cause a lot of problems, especially for those who publish torrents on sites such as The Pirate Bay.

A group of researchers from the University of Carlos III and the Institute IMDEA Networks ( in collaboration with other institutions ) keeps a detailed log of the data on those users who downloaded torrent files to Pirate Bay. The main reason is to study the phenomenon of “fake torrent” (“ fake torrent ”) in order to form a more viable BitTorrent “ecosystem”.
')
To do this, researchers track all files uploaded to Pirate Bay and, if possible, record the IP-addresses of the distribution initiators. And in many cases, these IP addresses are directly related to the person who uploaded the file to Pirate Bay.

Although researchers are going to use this data only in scientific interests, it is easy to imagine that copywriting, along with law enforcement officials, can use a similar mechanism for mass tracking of distributors of “pirated” content.

In order to show what kind of information is available to them, the researchers placed on the Internet a tool with the help of which anyone can search for users of Pirate Bay, and see from which cities (allegedly) an apploader with a certain nickname went to the network.

In addition, they published a graph of the top 100 most active uploaders (for the last month), which is headed by the glorious usernames TvTeam, scenebalance and XxXRG. The list, of course, can be convenient for Pirate Bay users - to see, if necessary, who pours the most into a particular category. For each uploader there is also some data about their IP addresses.

In some cases, there are hundreds of IP addresses associated with a user, but there are also usernames to which only a few IPs are attached (or even one and only).

Example of data on downloads (clickable):


As a result of the "surveillance", in addition to the files on individual users, the scientists got a more accurate picture of the Internet providers serving uploaders, as well as their geographical location.

Looking at the "top list of countries", we see that most Pirate Bay-uploaders come from the United States. Canada ranks second. Next come the Netherlands, Australia, United Kingdom, Sweden, Spain, Norway and France. Completes the list of the top 10 Brazil.

As can be seen below, the US also tops the list of the most used Internet service providers.
Comcast, Road Runner and Verizon make the top three. It is noteworthy that the 9th in the list is Dutch University of Tilburg (at the time of writing, the list was missing - Kassandr ).

Top ISPs


Although no one will be caught on the basis of the above data, it’s amazing how much information you can get about Pirate Bay accounts and their associated IP addresses.
Even if we ignore the connection with specific accounts, it is very indicative of the fact that many uploaders downloaded torrent files using a home connection to the Internet, with all the attendant risks.

Update:
Now researchers are working on updating the scripts, which in some cases can lead to data inaccessibility.

Example of inaccessible data (clickable):


Shl
I will refrain from comments in the translation body.