French Piracy Site YggTorrent Hacked and Shut Down After Community Backlash

🎬 On March 3, 2025, the French piracy site YggTorrent (YGG), ranked among France’s top 35 most visited websites, was hacked and taken offline by an individual known as Grosou, following community backlash over a new paid "Turbo Mode" subscription (€15/month or €85/lifetime). The attacker exploited a misconfigured pre-production server discovered via a favicon hash search on Shodan, revealing exposed ports (including 443 and 9306), unsecured admin credentials, and plaintext private keys. The breach exposed 19GB of data, including 6.6 million user accounts, transaction logs, 13 payment processors, 15 crypto wallets, and internal documents like an organigram identifying two primary admins (Oracle and Destroy). The hacker published 11GB of the data (excluding sensitive details like IPs and passwords) and alleged YGG generated €100 million in revenue (€5M/year profit) through a sophisticated money-laundering scheme involving 36 proxy domains, fake e-commerce sites, and crypto mixers like Tornado Cash. YGG’s admins initially denied the breach but later accused Grosou of extortion (a $100,000 ransom demand) and retaliated by doxxing him as a 23-year-old French reverse-engineering student, while the site permanently shut down days later. The incident revealed severe security flaws, including MD5-hashed passwords, a disguised crypto wallet scanner, and a script intercepting payment logs, alongside claims YGG had DDoSed competitors. Alternative piracy platforms like Lacal and Thor N9 emerged post-shutdown, with discussions shifting toward decentralized models to prevent similar centralization risks.