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RIAA and anti-p2p companies have constantly engaged in various methods to thwart sharing of albums and movies over BitTorrent. Detailed research on one of the popular methods (leecher attack) has proven that, the time and money spent on this method is just a waste. The researchers also suggest methods to completely nullify these attacks.

With law suits against BitTorrent users being very unpopular and legal action against every tracker being impossible, RIAA and record labels have long been using anti-p2p companies such as Media Defender, Safenet and Macrovision to engage in online attacks on various components of the BitTorrent ecosystem.

Of the many attacks used, a few are popular. Seeder attack focuses on attacking the seeder (uploader), in order to prevent the file reaching other users; however this attack needs to initiated at the very early stages of protecting an album or movie from propagating and seeders are usually experienced p2p users. Tracker attack involves flooding the tracker, however most trackers employ high bandwidth servers and many BitTorrent clients have employed other mechanisms such as distributed hash tables and gossips (letting other peers know about the peers discovered by a client). Uploading fake torrents to trackers is one other method used, however this only just frustrates the users but does not prevent or block the sharing of their valued content. Leecher attack is one of the most popular attack, for that it attempts to attack the majority of the BitTorrent ecosystem, the users actively downloading parts of a movie or album. Researchers have paid special attention to leecher attacks, due to this reason.

With the recent constant increase in internet related energy consumption, researchers are trying to address one main contributing factor – Running PCs 24/7 to run BitTorrents. A new architecture is being proposed to reduce the energy consumption and also reduce the download time. While promising, the architecture comes with a major limitation.

It is estimated that 74 TeraWatts hours (TWh) per year of electricity is consumed by internet. This 74 TWh is comprised of the energy consumed at data centers as well as the individual PCs. In 2007 data centers accounted for about 2 TWh per year, while office and home computers accounted for 16 TWh per year. Further, 21% of PCs used at work are never switched off, contributing to wastage of about 1.5 TWh per year. Of the variety of reasons for the computers not being turned off, P2P applications such as BitTorrent play a vital role. Recent studies report that 40 to 73% of the internet traffic is P2P and BitTorent is the most popular p2p protocol. Users are always in the quest for “which bittorrent program is the best”.  Based on these statistics, the group of researchers focus on a proxy based architecture for BitTorrent.