Why Rapidshare.com is down?

[LionDen]

News on why Rapidshare.com is down - Click Here.

Below is the article:


Rapidshare.com Down: RapidShare Rumored To Have Been Shut Down

There are rumors that Rapidshare.com, the German file sharing and data storage giant, has been shut down by the authorities after a court order.
German collections agency GEMA have reportedly won a temporary injunction against both RapidShare.de and RapidShare.com, according to a report.

However no court records have revealed any issued Rapidshare court order as of yet.

Currently rapidshare.com is not working but rapidshare.de is.

Users have been experiencing errors such as: "The following error was encountered: * Connection Failed The system returned: connection refused"

A Wikipedia entry was made that read: "As of 19 January 2008 16:00 GMT, Rapidshare AG’s servers were shutdown by anti-piracy authorities in Germany. More than hundreds of Rapidshare servers were seized from their offices in Berlin although no arrests were made. Sources said, authorities are contemplating pursuing legal action against users who distribute and download pirated copies of software and movies from these servers."

It was quickly removed.

Rapidshare.com, formerly Rapidshare.de, has been widely used as a vehicle for the transfer and sharing of pornography. Site such as HCMF.com commonly used the site as a means of perpetuating the illegal sharing of pornography.

A NSFW and EXTREMELY graphic example of its use (or abuse, depending on your view) can be found here. (you must be 18) As you can see, below the photo are the links to where the pieces needed to make one file exist (or existed) on Rapidshare.

Rapidshare.com, and Filefactory.com have also been abused by spammers, says Dave Marcus, security research and communications manager for McAfee's Avert Labs.

The "official" word is that the downtime is said to have been caused by a server overload.

Rapidshare technician Steven Gircham has reportedly commented on this issue - "There are rumors concerning attacks made on the Rapidshare.com servers. There are also rumors that Rapidshare has been shut down by a court order. These rumors are false. We would like to apologize to our users and inform them that no data has been lost. There have been some hardware issues as a result of high bandwidth and server overload. We are doing our very best to resolve the hardware issues, and users should expect uptime by midnight tonight (GMT)"

you can still view the site via IP - 80.239.151.250

They either got DOS attacked, and are having trouble getting there DNS working or they want it to at least appear that way. At the moment, it would appear that they where NOT taken down by any "anti-piracy orginizations"

Story developing...

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So, there you go, I hope this helps people.

[LionDen]

Update:

- Security hole found at Rapidshare.com - Click Here

Description:
GeFORC3 has reported a vulnerability in RapidShare Database, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct cross-site scripting attacks.

Input passed to the "Arayalim" parameter in Default.asp is not properly sanitised before being returned to the user. This can be exploited to execute arbitrary HTML and script code in a user's browser session in context of an affected site.

Solution:
Edit the source code to ensure that input is properly sanitised.

Provided and/or discovered by:
GeFORC3

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Update:

"rapidshare.com (DNS and web) is hosted on a net block of 195.122.131.0 - 195.121.131.255 (also referred to as 195.122.131/24 CIDR in network terms) which is part of a larger block 195.122.128.0 - 195.122.191.255 owned by Level3 UK service provider.

Level3 appears to be blocking inbound traffic destined for 195.122.131.0/24 at the edge of their network and they are dropping all rapidshare.com traffic such as DNS, web, etc. This is the point where they peer with other service providers.

This is highly unusual.

This is a drastic measure and one can only surmise two reasons that make any sense. 1) denial-of-service or 2) legal action."

[LionDen]

Update:

By Rapidshare:

20. January 2008 - Problems accessing RapidShare

Unfortunately, starting at 5 pm CET, one of our carriers experienced a severe technical problem with their hardware, causing a loss of 50 gigabit of bandwidth. Therefore RapidShare was unavailable for several hours. We already have taken steps to avoid this particular problem in the future