The closure of the Pirate Bay this summer led to a temporary 300 percent increase in the number of file-sharing Web sites, as users created sites to replace the Swedish BitTorrent tracker, according to security company McAfee.
Following a Swedish court order in August, one of the Pirate Bay's main ISPs, Black Internet, was forced to stop servicing the file-sharing site. The site was down for a day, before finding a new connection to the internet.
McAfee said in a report on Monday that file-sharers anticipated the shutdown and took technical steps to continue to share files.
"In the days prior to the shutdown, anonymizers indexed and relayed the data to users who might be blocked," said McAfee's latest quarterly threat report. "Open source code was available to anyone who wanted to help with redistribution of the BitTorrents."
Users created their own BitTorrent sites in August to support the Pirate Bay community, but when the Pirate Bay was available again within 24 hours, these sites disappeared quickly, said McAfee. The number of sites offering unauthorized downloads increased from under 300 in June to just under 1,400 in August, then decreased to approximately 400 in September, it said.
Read more on "Pirate Bay closure sparks rise in P2P sites" from ZDNet UK.
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