Backbone provider once again filters piracy sites with Cloudflare IP addresses

Internet backbone provider Cogent has again applied blackhole filtering to a series of Cloudflare IP addresses, making piracy sites such as The Pirate Bay inaccessible to a large number of internet users worldwide. The same thing happened in February.

Cogent uses blackhole filtering at the IP addresses 104.31.16.3 and 104.31.17.3, which are used by, among others, The Pirate Bay, TorrentProject, Icefilms, Torlock, Popcorn-Time, Movie4k and 1Channel, writes Torrentfreak. The IP addresses are from content delivery network Cloudflare, which had moved the sites in question to these addresses after an earlier filtering campaign in February.

Cogent had set those black holes against a single, unknown site under a court order, but the consequences were broader because Cloudflare puts more sites behind single IP addresses. It is not known what caused the new filtering. Torrentfreak says it is probably a new case of consequential damage.

Because Cogent is a backbone provider, a large proportion of internet users worldwide cannot access the sites. This concerns users whose connections run through the company’s network. It is not known exactly how many there are. In particular, providers and data centers in the US and Canada work with Cogent.