If you are a torrent lover and have registered on BitTorrent community forum website, then you may have had your personal details compromised, along with your hashed passwords. The BitTorrent team has announced that its community forums have been hacked, which exposed private information of hundreds of thousands of its users.

As of now, BitTorrent is the most visited torrent client around the world with more than 150 Million monthly active users. Besides this, BitTorrent also has a dedicated community forum that has over hundreds of thousands of registered members with tens of thousands of daily visitors. 

Some of the most widely used BitTorrent applications, including uTorrent, Mainline, and Vuze are also the most vulnerable to a newly discovered form of denial of service attack that makes it easy for a single person to bring down large sites.

The distributed reflective DoS attacks exploit weaknesses found in the open BitTorrent protocol, which millions of people rely on to exchange files over the Internet. But it turns out that features found uTorrent, Mainline, and Vuze make them especially suitable for the technique. DRDoS allows a single BitTorrent user with only modest amounts of bandwidth to send malformed requests to other BitTorrent users.

The newly launched torrent search engine BTindex crawls BitTorrent's DHT network for new files. It's a handy service, but one that comes with a controversial twist. In addition to listing hundreds of thousands of magnet links, it also exposes the IP-addresses of BitTorrent users to the rest of the world.

 Unless BitTorrent users are taking steps to hide their identities through the use of a VPN, proxy, or seedbox, their downloading habits are available for almost anyone to snoop on.  By design the BitTorrent protocol shares the location of any user in the swarm. After all, without knowing where to send the data nothing can be shared to begin with.