Top 10 Best & Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2012

Last year I posted the best p2p software clients and here again I've listed the world's most popular BitTorrent sites. At the start of 2012 The Pirate Bay continues to pull in the most visitors, followed by Torrentz and KickassTorrents.

This list is based on traffic rank and reports from Compete and Alexa, though we are all aware that Alexa isn't perfect and that Compete has plenty of flaws, but putting the two services to use at the same time on similar niche proved worthwhile.

So here we are, a compiled list of the 10 most-visited torrent sites at the start of the new year.

Don't forget to use BTGuard to protect your Bittorent Traffic, So be careful and good luck.

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1. The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay (commonly abbreviated TPB) is a Swedish website that hosts magnet links, which allow users to share electronic files, including music, computer games and software, via BitTorrent. The Pirate Bay bills itself as "The world's most resilient BitTorrent site" (as of 2012, "The galaxy's most resilient...") The Pirate Bay is currently ranked as the 78th most visited website in the world and 20th in Sweden by Alexa Internet, has over 5.5 million registered users and, as of February 2012, hosts more than 4 million torrent files. According to the Los Angeles Times, The Pirate Bay is "one of the world's largest facilitators of illegal downloading" and "the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright or pro-piracy movement".

2. Torrentz

Torrentz is a Finland-based[2] meta-search engine for BitTorrent that is run by an individual known as Flippy. It indexes torrents from various major torrent sites such as yourBittorrent and offers compilations of various trackers per torrent that are not necessarily present in the default .torrent file, so that when a tracker is down, other trackers can do the work. It was the second most popular torrent website after The Pirate Bay in 2010[3], and it currently has a traffic rank of 145 on Alexa.

3. KickassTorrents

Founded in 2009, KickassTorrents is one of the youngest sites in the list, and this year it moved up to the top 3. Responding to the increasing worries about domain seizures, the site moved from its kickasstorrents.com domain to kat.ph a few months ago. The site continues to innovate and release new features every other week, and it currently ranks 257 on Alexa.

4. IsoHunt

IsoHunt is a BitTorrent index with over 1.7 million torrents in its database and 20 million peers from indexed torrents. With 7.4 million unique visitors as of May 2006, isoHunt is one of the most popular BitTorrent search engines. Thousands of torrents are added to and deleted from it every day. Users of isoHunt perform over 40 million unique searches per month. On October 19, 2008, isoHunt passed the 1 petabyte mark for torrents indexed globally. The site is the third most popular BitTorrent site as of 2008. According to isoHunt, the total amount of shared content was more than 13.44 petabytes as of September 29, 2011.

5. BTjunkie

BTJunkie was a BitTorrent search engine operating between 2005 and 2012. It used a web crawler (similar to Google) to search for torrent files from other torrent sites and store them on its database. It had nearly 4,000,000 active torrents and about 4,200 torrents added daily (compared to runner-up Torrent Portal with 1,500), making it the largest torrent site indexer on the web. During 2011, BTJunkie was the 5th most popular BitTorrent site.

6. ExtraTorrent

ExtraTorrent is one of those robust torrent indexes that doesn’t make the news very often. Compared to last year the site has moved up a spot and is now the 6th most popular torrent venue.

7. Demonoid

Demonoid is a website and BitTorrent tracker created by an anonymous programmer (supposedly of Serbian origin) known only by the pseudonyms "Deimos" and "Zajson". The website indexes torrents uploaded by its members. Demonoid.com was ranked the 538th most popular website overall in December 2010, according to Alexa. Demonoid's torrent tracker had an estimated three million peers in September 2007. The site had over 252,427 torrents indexed as of May 3, 2009 (torrents uploaded prior to August 4, 2005 were removed to free server resources).

8. EZTV

Unlike the other sites in the top 10, TV-torrent distribution group EZTV is a niche site specializing in TV content only. Despite its fair share of downtime this year, EZTV has managed to get a spot in the top 10 for the first time in its six year existence.

9. Bitsnoop

BitSnoop is another newcomer that gained a large audience this year. This didn’t go unnoticed by the RIAA, who filed a complaint at the U.S. District Court of Columbia and obtained a subpoena to reveal the identity of BitSnoop’s owner a few months ago.

10. 1337x

1337x is also new to the top 10, and focuses more on the community aspect than some competitors. The site’s owners say they started 1337x to “fill an apparent void where it seemed there was a lack of quality conscience ad free torrent sites with public trackers.” Its 10th place this year proves that they’re getting the success formula right.

How to use VPN to defeat Deep Packet Inspection

Imagine a technology that can stop spam and malware, identify and block illegal downloads, and allow ISPs to prioritize the data they transmit by content as well as by type. Sounds pretty good.

Now imagine a technology that gives network managers and governments the ability to monitor everything you do on the Internet, including reading and recording your e-mail and other digital communications, and tracking your every move on the Web.

Of course, it's the same technology--deep packet inspection (DPI) by name. That's how governments around the world are able to spy on their citizens' online activities and control their access to the Internet.

ISPs have long been able to record every site you visit and track what you do on those sites. They can and do block access to specific sites.

But only recently has it become practical from a bandwidth and resource perspective for network providers to read all the data in the packets sent from and delivered to their customers' computers without slowing their networks to a crawl.

North Korea, China, Iran, and other countries routinely use deep packet inspection to block Internet content and keep tabs on their citizens.

The easiest way to cover your Web tracks is to encrypt your data and network connection. The most popular encryption services use a virtual private network(VPN).

Free VPN services come with a price
The free HTTPS Everywhere Firefox add-on from the Electronic Frontier Foundation automatically encrypts connections on sites that support the technology. Unfortunately, not all sites support HTTPS, among other limitations.

A more thorough technique for preventing your Web activities from being recorded is to establish a VPN connection. The Tech Support Alert site rates several free VPN services in its guide to anonymous-surfing products.

Topping the list are CyberGhost VPN, ProXPN, and SecurityKiss.

I tried the free versions of ProXPN and OpenVPN's Private Tunnel, but the first is too slow (and annoying), and the second gives you only 100MB of data transfers. The paid versions of both products remove these limitations, as you might have guessed.

Quick and simple setup, but painful performance in the free version

It took only a few minutes to install ProXPN and sign up for a free account. Click the red lock icon that appears in the Windows notification area or Mac menu bar to establish an encrypted connection.

Once your VPN connection is established, hover over the green lock icon to view the IP address and other information about the VPN server you're linking through.

The free version's slow 100Kbps maximum transfer speed harkens back to the pre-broadband days of dial-up modems. Also, when you open your browser you have to click through an annoying ProXPN "upgrade now" screen to get to your designated home page.

According to the company's site, the ProXPN Premium service has "no bandwidth restrictions, all available ports are open, PPTP VPN enabled (in addition to our standard OpenVPN), full access to all proXPN servers world-wide, and port selection." The premium version costs $10 a month or $50 for six months; the company offers a 7-day free trial.

Not much encryption offered by the free version of OpenVPN's Private Tunnel
Apart from the 100MB data limit, the open-source Private Tunnel service is a breeze to sign up for and use. But most Internet users will burn through the free version's data-transfer allotment in a couple of days. As with ProXPN, Private Tunnel places an icon on the desktop that you click to establish an encrypted connection.

The service offers 50GB of protected data transfers for $12 a year, 100GB for $20 per year, and 500GB for $50 per year; the company estimates that most people transfer between 50GB and 100GB of data per year.

By comparison, the free version of the OpenVPN-based SecurityKiss service provides up to 300MB of encrypted data transmissions per month for free. An account allowing up to 20GB per month costs $3.97 for one month or $31.71 for one year; while the service's unlimited plan costs $13.25 for one month or $119.26 for one year. (Three-month and six-month plans with various data limits are also available.)

Many people will respond to the privacy threat posed by deep packet inspection with a big yawn. After all, if you don't want to be tracked, don't use the Internet. But privacy advocates such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are unanimous in their opposition to indiscriminate online eavesdropping, whether it's done by public or private entities. For the time being, it remains possible to keep the trackers at bay. Use it or lose it.

Anonymous operating system prompts security warnings

More than 26,000 people have downloaded an operating system which members of the Anonymous hacker group claim to have created.

The software is based on a version of the open-source operating system Linux and comes outfitted with lots of website sniffing and security tools.

The "official" Anonymous group has distanced itself from the software.

In a widely circulated tweet, AnonOps claimed the operating system was riddled with viruses.

Tool box

The operating system is available via the Source Forge website - a well-known repository for many custom code projects.

The 1.5GB download is based on Ubuntu - one of the most popular versions of the Linux operating system. The software's creators say they put it together for "education purposes to checking the security of web pages (sic)".

It asked people not to use it to destroy webpages.

Soon after the operating system became available, the AnonOps account on Twitter posted a message saying it was fake and "wrapped in trojans".

The creators of the OS denied it was infected with viruses adding that, in the world of open-source software, "there were no viruses".

Code check

After downloading and running the software, Rik Ferguson, director of Trend Micro's European security research efforts, said it was "a functional OS with a bunch of pre-installed tools that can be used for things like looking for [database] vulnerabilities or password cracking".

It also included tools such as Tor that can mask a person's online activities. In many ways, he said, it was a pale imitation of a version of Linux known as Back Track that also comes with many security tools already installed.

Mr Ferguson said he was starting work to find out if there were any viruses or booby-traps buried in the code.

Graham Cluley, senior researcher at hi-tech security firm Sophos, wondered who would be tempted to use it.

"Who would want to put their trust in a piece of unknown software written by unknown people on a webpage that they don't know is safe or not?" he asked.

He warned people to be very wary, adding that some hacktivists keen to support the work of Anonymous had been tricked earlier in the year into installing a booby-trapped attack tool.

"Folks would be wise to be very cautious," he said.

MagicTree v1.1 – Penetration Testing Productivity Tool

Have you ever spent ages trying to find the results of a particular portscan you were sure you did? Or grepping through a bunch of files looking for data for a particular host or service? Or copy-pasting bits of output from a bunch of typescripts into a report? I have certainly did, and when I heard about the release of this tool, my heart was filled with joy, at last I can now spend time doing the real thing, you know what i mean:).

Lets get it straight for those that don't or haven't had about it.

MagicTree is a penetration tester productivity tool. It is designed to allow easy and straightforward data consolidation, querying, external command execution and (yeah!) report generation. In case you wonder, "Tree" is because all the data is stored in a tree structure, and "Magic" is because it is designed to magically do the most cumbersome and boring part of penetration testing - data management and reporting.

Updates

• Rapid 7 NeXpose XML import (both simple XML and full XML formats are supported)
• Arachni XML import (as of 0.4.0.2. Thanks to Herman Stevens of Astyran for contribution)
• OWASP Zed Attack Proxy XML import (development snapshot as of 6-Feb-2012)
• New matrix query interface
• Bug fix (#224) Remove orphan projects does not work anymore
• Bug fix (#226) NPE in dumpData()
• Bug fix (#239) “Uncaught exception in Swing thread: null. null” when saving a custom query into the repo
• Bug fix (#241) Corrupted reference links in report templates
• Bug fix (#242) Updated report templates to honor “ignore” status

You can download MagicTree here

Or read the detailed documentation here.