IPv6 peers flooding torrents

Have you been experiencing low torrent downloads?

Hello there tech fans and especially torrent download lovers, Am sure you have experienced such low download speeds while downloading a movie or TV show on UTorrent or BitTorrent and the torrent has many seeds. Let me tell you what is happening but first lets get to know what is IPv6...

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. Created to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion and is intended to replace IPv4.

Now that said, lets go back to our main topic and will also get to know more about IPv6 later on. Ok, this is it, popular TV and Movie torrents got sabotaged by a group of unknown hackers as they are flooding them with swarms IPV6 peers making it nearly impossible for torrent users to download files. This attack is taken as a anti- piracy guerrilla attack which has made torrent users unable to download files.

Bit torrent and UTorrent softwares which is used by many of us has been a highly robust protocol which has been used for file sharing. However, there have been systematic efforts to prevent large groups of people from sharing popular pirated TV-shows and movies. BitTorrent and UTorrent plus many other Torrent download softwares have been used for sharing large number of pirated tv shows and movies. In recent weeks or days depending on when you noticed is that downloads have been very slow and funny enough the torrent has enough seeds and health. The techniques used by hackers unable users to use BitTorrent by bringing it down by swarming it with IPv6 and with a fake peer request they enter the request queue and keep the client busy which in return slows down the site..

The process works like this: The attacker joins a popular torrent swarm with hundreds, if not thousands of IPv6 addresses. These fake peers request data from real downloaders, quickly filling up their request queues. Now that filling up or swarming has halted the speed of files at which they got downloaded as a result it may take a hour or two long movie to get downloaded in days. When the attack got confirmed, UTorrent banned the harmful peers but it could not help as the attackers already had a list of different IP addresses used by them.

Some possible fixes:

Have you been affected? Here are some settings you can use to prevent it for a while. UTorrent users can do this and also BitTorrent's communications kernel may possess similar features, so nearly the same mitigation may work for BitTorrent. Under "Settings/Preferences".

1. Preferences: "BitTorrent" : "Protocol Encryption"
-- CHANGE MODE TO "Forced"
-- SET TO "Disallow Incoming Legacy Connections" (Uncheck the Option button)

2. Preferences : "Advanced": // On the Filter space type "ip" //
-- SET net.dissallow_incoming_ipv6 TO True
-- SET ipfilter.enable TO True

There is no evidences so far as far as I know about the one who is after this hack but yes this move was against piracy as this was for Movie and TV shows torrents only. But all said I think this is the most effective attempts to disrupt torrent downloads in these years

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