Dutch file-sharing website The Pirate Bay has been hit by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. It confirmed the attack on its Facebook page. "We're under a quite big DDoS attack. We don't know who's behind it but we have our suspicions."

A provider of DDoS defence systems said that it was unlikely that the attack came from hacking group Anonymous. Andre Stewart of Corero Network Security told the BBC; "It could be the record labels, or a government somewhere that has had enough of not being able to catch The Pirate Bay, it could be just one person who had rented some cloud power from Amazon and is sitting in a cafe, and is able to launch an attack."

PC Pro reports that network firm Renesys studied the network traffic to The Pirate Bay during the attack. It said The Pirate Bay normally has two ISPs providing access - ROBTEX and Serious Tubes Networks - as well as a host of peers. Before the attack, the bulk of traffic was routed via ROBTEX and one major peer. After the attack, ROBTEX disappeared and hasn't picked up the traffic again, leaving Serious Tubes to step in to provide access. "However, Serious Tubes is only using one of its providers, Portlane, which in turn isn't using its full set of options to route traffic to TPB."

The site takedown follows the file-sharing site being blocked by UK ISPs after a court order, following a complaint from music lobby group the BPI. Now, and as a direct result of the Pirate Bay ban, the website of the UK Pirate Party is benefiting. In just over three weeks it has jumped more than 100,000 places in the UK rankings and any moment now will become the 1,500th most-visited website in the country, reports TorrentFreak.

In a separate development, the Pirate Party has been ordered to stop publicising ways to circumvent blocks to The Pirate Bay. The ruling by a court in the Hague follows a complaint by the anti-piracy group Brein. It had said that the political party was helping users overcome a previous ruling that had ordered two of the country's biggest internet service providers to prohibit access to The Pirate Bay. A subsequent order instructed a further five ISPs to block access to the site.

Story filed 20.05.12