While these mirrors provide a bridge to the past, they are often unregulated. Research has shown that a significant number of torrent proxy sites—up to 99% in some samples—tamper with the original site's code to inject malicious scripts, advertisements, or malware.

A proxy, in technical terms, is an intermediary server. In the torrenting world, a proxy site takes the original content (or a clone of it) and hosts it under a new domain to bypass ISP blocks. For example, if your ISP blocks extratorrent.cc , you would access extratorrent.proxy[.]in instead.

When users search for an ExtraTorrent proxy today, they are looking for "mirror" sites. These are third-party websites that replicate the look and feel of the original ExtraTorrent.