Brazil Blocks Another 250+ Pirate Domains, Milestone #15,000 Just Ahead

During the coming weeks, the 15,000th piracy-linked resource will likely find itself blocked by Brazilian ISPs in response to yet another court order. Indications that Brazil is already testing piracy blocking measures at the internet's core routers is controversial, but if blocking is accurate and only targets pirate sites, criticism may be limited. With a new 250+ domain blocking wave implemented this week, let's take a closer look at how things play out.

Brazil’s enthusiasm for blocking piracy-linked domains and IP addresses is showing no signs of slowing down.

Despite being a relative newcomer to mass blockades on copyright grounds, Brazil’s ISPs will soon find themselves blocking the 15,000th resource since restrictions began in earnest just a couple of years ago.

That the cycle is guaranteed to continue next year, and at minimum a few years after that, celebrating the blocking of the 30,000th domain or IP address is no longer the impossible dream it once was. Whether the constant requirement for more and more blocking is a sign of success, or more like a dream turning into a nightmare, is hard to say. Pirates don’t appear to be deterred by it, that much as obvious.

What if Blocking Works and There are No Blunders?

In a recent interview, a departing board member of telecoms regulator Anatel said that site-blocking is paying off. Artur Coimbra said that customer satisfaction with pirate set-top boxes is in decline and if that continues, one day people won’t want to use piracy services at all.

It’s hard to fault the theory that people dislike spending money on things that fail to perform. Whether that’s how things will actually play out remains to be seen because history has shown that the opposite generally holds true. But Coimbra also had some controversial news up his sleeve about a new piracy countermeasure; he revealed that blocking tests are already underway at the internet’s core routers.

The implications of blocking blunders at the infrastructure level go beyond anything considered thus far. But what if mistakes and the risk to society could be eliminated? What if there was accuracy and transparency and accountability, all at the same time? Given that showing accuracy is largely reliant on full transparency which rarely exists, accountability isn’t a concept closely associated with site-blocking regimes anywhere.

That being said, wherever possible we always try to find out for ourselves and since an unexpected surge of blocking orders covering 250+ domains went live yesterday, now seems a good time to take a closer look.

Brazil’s Blocklist is Not Dissimilar to Many Others

Brazil’s blocklist isn’t available to the public but since ISPs are required to comply and the effects should in theory be visible, various means allow for a decent overview. Right now the list contains over 13,100 domains and around 1,500 IP addresses, most of them piracy-related but not exclusively so.

Blocked gambling sites also feature quite strongly, as do sites selling vapes, although at least for now, relatively sparingly. Even Elon Musk’s X appeared on the list recently; after the entrepreneur irritated a judge, the convenience of having a blocking mechanism to hand made the consequences very predictable.

Movies and Live Sports Piracy

Having been heavily targeted previously, stream-ripping platforms deserve a mention, but largely they get to sit this wave out. The list still contains lots of related domains, including around 50 ytmp3 variants, 24 featuring the term y2mate, and another 50 with conv/convert/converter somewhere in their domain, but the new batch is all about streaming.

The new domains added Monday follow directly after a batch of familiar piracy domains including 123movieswatch4k.com, 123movieslane.com, 123movieses.net, 123moviesking.com, and 123movieszfree.me.

With that naming convention offering no surprises, the same holds true for several recently added bflix domains, accompanied by even more 123movies domains, because why not? They’ll be useless by the end of the week anyway.

The list of new additions is initially dominated by variants of multicanais, a popular live sports streaming platform that refuses to stay blocked. Less easy to explain is the domain highlighted in yellow – danielgarcialeilao.org.

While hiding pirate sites within innocent-looking platforms isn’t unheard of, the site shown above appears to be an auction site for recovered and wrecked vehicles, and we haven’t see anything like that before.

Targeting Dan

Alternatively, if reports elsewhere are to be believed, this may be a fake site impersonating the real Daniel Garcia Auctions. According to reports, the difference is that while one is a business that actually exists, the other takes customers’ money and heads for the hills.

While there will be few complaints if the authorities protect citizens from an alleged scam at the hands of a fake Dan, there’s another Dan on the blocklist that is 100% genuine. Domain sales platform Dan.com is owned by GoDaddy and may not be performing quite as well in Brazil as previously hoped.

The URL https://t.co/rtG5bJ3jkz is also blocked, presumably because it previously linked to FilmesTorrents.net. Today that domain is up for sale on GoDaddy but if anyone from Brazil is interested in it, using a VPN or similar circumvention tool comes with its own risks. We’re informed that circumvention of blockades can be considered an offense in Brazil although under what circumstances isn’t completely clear.

FilmesTorrent fans, meanwhile, must’ve had fun keeping up with domain changes; at the time of writing there are 34 domains on the blocklist with a similar format.

Trying to keep track of domain changes for streaming site Cuevana and its many namesakes would’ve been exponentially more tricky. At the time of writing there are more than 500 variants on the list, including icuevana4.pro, cuevana3z.autos, cuevana3.supply, and the aptly named, cuevanaa.help, which throws in an extra ‘a’ at the end, just to keep things interesting.

Conclusion

Just scrolling through 10,000+ domains is pretty exhausting so detailed checking will likely take us quite a few hours. There’s only so much automated tools can achieve on their own so if other obviously legitimate domains also appear on the list, we’ll report that in due course.

What we can confirm is that after scanning every domain recently added to the list, attempting to take a screenshot, scraping a small amount of text from each, and carrying out some automated security checks, 22 domains had issues related to some type of malware. At least 30 indicated a risk of phishing. In both cases this may relate to a new domain in the event redirects are already in place.

We certainly aren’t recommending that people visit any of the sites but for those who can’t resist, basic anti-virus software is unlikely to detect these types of threats.

That being said, common sense says that Dan.com shouldn’t be on this list. There might be a reason, but it’s unlikely to be viewed in a positive light back in the United States. It’s possible that GoDaddy doesn’t even know that it’s being blocked, but that’s no surprise when transparency becomes a thing of the past.

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