There's at least one benefit to The Pirate Bay's brief departure from the Internet in August - it showed the resiliency of the BitTorrent community. Even though the world's largest tracker was taken offline for a short while, the BitTorrent community, with its near limitless supply of tech savvy individuals, was able to set up alternative trackers and communities within days - if not hours.

So what happened when The Pirate Bay was shut down for about 24 hours? According to McAfee, who in addition to making anti-virus software also tracks malicious website trends, noticed something quite remarkable. Although The Pirate Bay was down for only about a day, within that time the number of BitTorrent websites designed to support the community jumped nearly 300 percent.

But there's a bit of a dark side to that as well. Although there seems to be an enthusiastic and legitimate succession mechanism in place if and when The Pirate Bay falls, numerous malicious sites accompanies that growth.

"The number of new file-sharing sites hosting unauthorized, copyrighted content skyrocketed over the last three months, according to McAfee, Inc.’s (NYSE:MFE) Third Quarter Threats Report. The report also shows that spam, malware and Web-based threat creation has reached record levels in the last quarter, and that cybercriminals are extorting site-owners with threats of DDoS attacks."

Of course, The Pirate Bay didn't stay down. So the number of BitTorrent support sites quickly vanished - but the malicious sites will probably stick around long until people wise up or they finish juicing the unsuspecting web wanderers.

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