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Pirate Bay's 'move' to North Korea a hoax

Following the torrent site's announcement suggesting it was being hosted in North Korea, programmers debunk those claims and believe it had made use of fake routing to hide its true location.
Written by Ellyne Phneah, Contributor
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The Republic of Korea is actually the official name for South Korea, while the North is known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

The Pirate Bay on Monday announced it moved to a new provider for its Web site, but at least one programmer has found the statement a hoax.

The torrent site had released a statement on Monday implying it was now being hosted in North Korea, and they had been invited by the leader of the Republic of Korea "to fight their battles from [its] network."
"We believe that being offered our virtual asylum in North Korea is a first step of this country's changing view of access to information," the statement said. "It's a country opening up and one thing is sure, they do not care about threats like we do."

The statement had also after The Norwegian Pirate Party (NPP) released a pastebin announcement earlier on the same day explaining it was forced to cut the bandwidth they were supplying The Pirate Bay due to financial pressures from the industry.

However, a programmer named Will had found the statement on The Pirate Bay's move to North Korea to be a hoax. In his blog, Will said he backward engineered the signal and traced the actual hosting to a location in Asia, which was not North Korea.

According to his analysis, it is likely the torrent site was hijacking Autonomous System (AS) numbers to hide its true location.

Another analysis on Hacker News also found The Pirate Bay hijacked some IP addresses, set up a fake Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) advertisement and generated an artificial delay. "They are faking [or] spoofing the ICMP responses. They are also prepending their route advertisement with corresponding AS paths to further disguise it," noted Hacker News.

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