(KickAss Torrents) (KAT) is a popular torrent site that was founded in 2008 and launched at the domain name kickasstorrents.com; however, it went offline on 20 July 2016 when its domain was seized by the US government. Following a series of domain name seizures by the US government, it was transferred to the Philippine domain kat.ph in April 2011. KickAss was a website that provided a directory for torrent files and magnet links to enable peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol. It quickly surpassed The Pirate Bay as the most popular BitTorrent directory. However, due to illegal operations, Kickass was quickly banned after being tracked down by the government.