If you’ve been watching open signup threads on various BitTorrent forums, you may have stumbled across a new site, www.scenetorrents.biz. Not only does this tracker have the same name, favicon, logo, category icons as the legendary ScT (now defunct) but its staff even claims it to be a resurrection of SceneTorrents known as ScT v2.0. As much as old ScT members would like to hail the return of their beloved torrent site, these claims simply aren't true. SceneTorrents.biz is not ScT reborn – it’s just another General/0Day torrent tracker that tries to ride the popularity of a BitTorrent legend. Not only has the impostor site been shot down on ScT IRC channel but SCC, another respected scene tracker, has issued a warning about ScT.biz administrators having ‘malicious intentions’.
When SceneTorrents.biz opened up a couple of days before, there was an interesting message on the homepage (quoted below). As you can see, site admin claims they have brought ScT back from the dead (although not in very good English):
Hello Friends ... After R.I.P. Old Stuff Decides Bring SCT Back to Alive Again!!
Us Will Take Some Time to Config Old Dump Again (1,2 Months), Us Need Uploaders If You Have Server With +100Mbit and Scene Acess Contact Staff on Menu INFO and SUPPORT
Us NEED DONATIONS, to KEEP us ALIVE, Dont Let SCT Dies Again.
Old Users if can PROOF old stats, Send Jpeg Link For Us With Your Old Stats on Menu INFO on SUPPORT, and Soon Your Old Status Will Be Recovered.
About IRCD. Nomore ANNOUNCE on IRC will be used. Security Reasons!Kind Regards,
The SCT Staff Leader.
However, the trusted IRC channel of SceneTorrents (called ex-user hangout channel after the shutdown) refuses this claim. Quoted below is the channel topic from a few days before:
* Now talking in #SceneTorrents
* Topic is '[scenetorrents ex-user hangout chan] :: no invite asking / trading / offering :: ScTBDev - Out Soon :: SCT-SCC Theme - 0.9 :: - ENGLISH ONLY - scenetorrents.biz is a fake scam site.'
* Set by feeling on Wed Feb 17 02:51:30
If the above was not enough proof for skeptics, another warning came from SCC, a well respected private tracker in the BT scene. SCC issued the following security reminder to all its members through their homepage. Pay attention to the text in bold:
Security Reminder
We would like to remind you that you should NOT use the same password on SCC as you do on other sites. Additionally, it is important to use a complex password, with at least 8 characters (and not easily guessable, but easy for you to remember). Not all websites encrypt the user passwords, meaning they will be able to see them in clear text. We thought it would be a good idea to remind everyone of this as there has been a ScT "Scam" site popping up under a .biz domain, we have reasons to believe they have malicious intentions with the site.
We’re not quite sure what these malicious intentions are but user account theft would be a fine guess. We have so far not heard from anyone who signed up with ScT.biz that their accounts got stolen but it’s always good to heed the warnings and change your passwords ASAP if you did register there.
If you’ve been reading us for long, you’d have noticed that we rarely flame BitTorrent trackers. However, there’s been some cases where sites we thought to be trustworthy turning out to be rogue trackers. For example, we received so many complaints from our readers regarding password theft by a MusicThe.Net , a tracker we reviewed couple of weeks ago [Read the comments here].The morale here is you can’t trust anyone these days. As we have highlighted many times before, using different login details for different trackers can go a long way in protecting your tracker accounts. If you can’t remember them, save the login information in your browser. It’s best to back up the saved credentials with a tool such as XMarks so you’d never lose them even if your PC fails.
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