EZTV Shut Down: Hacker Coup Forces TV Torrent Site To Voluntarily Go Offline

Millions of Internet pirates around the world shed a tear Monday when EZTV, one of the premier TV torrent sites online, announced it will no longer distribute illegally uploaded TV shows. The news comes months after EZTV rebounded from the raid that knocked the Pirate Bay offline permanently.

EZTV was ranked as one of the most popular torrent websites on all of the Internet earlier this year before its administrators announced their domain was compromised by unknown infiltrators. That breach proved fatal Monday, when TorrentFreak reported that the minds behind EZTV elected to voluntarily close up shop since they were unable to stop the hackers from spreading from one EZTV domain to another. Even the email address belonging to NovaKing, the name used by EZTV's leader, was compromised, with hackers posing as NovaKing and reaching out to other illicit sites in disguise.

“While EZTV could technically start over using a new name, the group’s founder decided to throw in the towel. Too much had already been lost. The group had always been a 'fun' nonprofit project, and the recent troubles took the fun away,” EZTV's administrators told TorrentFreak. “The scammers, meanwhile, continue to operate both the .it and .ch domain names and are now distributing their own torrents with the hijacked EZTV brand. They pretend to be the real deal, sending out misleading and false status updates, but they’re not.”

An April security update was supposed to have rid EZTV's systems of any unauthorized intruders. But the shutdown Monday also proves that, for torrent sites that have filled the vacuum that opened when the Pirate Bay was shut down, more attention also creates more problems.