Chrome, Safari and Firefox Blocked The Pirate Bay as a Phishing site

Torrent lovers all over the world were caught in a bit of mess since yesterday as Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox browsers are blocking access The Pirate Bay website for indulging in phishing.

According to all three browsers, Thepiratebay.se is a “deceptive site” or “web forgery,” that may steal user information.  When torrent lovers visit the TPB website through any of the above browsers, instead of a page displaying the iconic pirate ship, they are presented with an ominous red warning banner.

Interestingly, if you navigate to https://thepiratebay.se in Firefox, you get a very bare homepage and only get the warning if you search for a torrent. In Chrome, the error is there right off the bat.

"Attackers on thepiratebay.se may trick you into doing something dangerous like installing software or revealing your personal information (for example, passwords, phone numbers, or credit cards).”

TorrentFreak stated that the Thepiratebay.se has been blocked by the major browsers, labelling the site as “web forgery” and “deceptive site”. It further states that these browsers blocked access to the popular torrent site due to security issues.

Firefox users are meanwhile told, “This web page at thepiratebay.se has been reported as a web forgery and has been blocked based on your security preferences.”

When the thepiratebay.se is checked on Google’s safebrowsing, it marks the site as dangerous as the “thepiratebay.se contains deceptive content”. The issues are generally due to third party advertisers. Last week, it was reported that some ads were circulating ransomware via the site.

However, it is very likely that even the current problems are related to issues caused by third-party advertisers. Just last week Malwarebytes reported that some ads were dropping ransomware through TPB.

The warnings are not displayed to all users and it seems that it is limited to the desktop versions of the major browsers, and everyone is not getting error while visiting the site. However, TPB is working fine on Android devices.

TorrentFreak reported that The Pirate Bay group is aware of this issue and may resolve this soon. You can still access the website by disabling the browser’s security warning in the settings section, however we don’t recommend you to do so, it is better to wait for official patch