• • • • • Thanks to Andrew O’Donnell of SophosLabs for his behind-the-scenes work on this article. Back in the early days of computer viruses, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, advice on how to avoid infection often started like this: Don’t pirate stuff.

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The theory was simple: disks handed around for repeated unlawful duplication couldn’t be trusted, especially after they’d been passed between many different users, any one of whom could have infected them along the way, whether through carelessness or malevolence. Ironically, perhaps, a lot of software piracy back then involved simply copying a friend’s copy using low-level disk cloning software, itself usually pirated, that made precise and perfect copies. Most virus infections, in fact, came from data disks, or even from otherwise blank disks, that contained what were known as boot sector viruses. Every disk, pirated or not, code or data, full or empty, had a boot sector, and if you left an infected floppy in your computer by mistake when you turned it on, the infection would spread when the.

Pirated software turned out to be a much less dangerous vector for virus infection than people first assumed. In recent years, however, pirated software has deliberately and regularly, if not frequently, been used to spread malware. Crooks rip off popular software distributions, add their own “secret sauce”, and then announce them in pirate forums or on imposter sites, hoping that sufficiently many victims will download them and end up infected before word gets out.

Examples include: • A software suite (back before it was free) that included malware called OSX/Iworks-A. • A programming toolkit, offered outside the App Store under the guise of providing faster downloads in China, booby-trapped with Xcodeghost.

This malware surreptitiously infects iPhone apps as they are compiled from source. • A of the popular Linux Mint distribution that installed zombie malware called Linux/Tsunami-A along with the operating system. The Pirate Bay One place where you might assume there would be lots of malware is infamous file-sharing site The Pirate Bay, or TPB for short. (More precisely, TPB shares links to files, not the files themelves, a legalistic nuance not accepted by every court.) On the other hand, you can argue that it would be rare to find pirated movies that were infected with malware, for two main reasons: • Video files generally don’t contain malware that could infect you only by watching them.

Most video files just get watched, and that’s that, therefore there’s not much opportunity for malware propagation. • Download sites tend to be self-policing, because files at the top of the download list get there because lots of previous downloaders continue sharing them for other people to fetch. Therefore risky downloads ought to drop quickly off the list. The Bittorrent file sharing protocol, for example, relies on seeds – existing users who already have the entire file on their hard disk, and who are prepared to keep on allowing new file sharers to download parts of it.

So, just how dangerous are TPB video downloads? Here’s an example TPB download list, prepared by SophosLabs (for research purposes only, of course!), showing popular downloads ordered by the count of seeders: In online piracy, as in many things, nothing breeds success like success. A video file that won’t play properly, or which is booby-trapped, or is poor quality, or is not what it claimed to be, will struggle to make its way organically to the top of the seeders’ list. After all, the current set of disappointed downloaders will simply delete the dodgy file, meaning that they won’t be seeders any more, so the next wave of potential downloaders will find a different set of video files rising to the top. This is interestingly different sort of self-correcting recommendation system to most mainstream sites. On Facebook and Twitter, for instance, you tend not to go back and un-press the “Like” or the “Retweet” button, even if you change your mind later on. On TPB, in contrast, un-seeding a file is effectively an automatic “Unlike.” Fake seeds Nevertheless, there is a risk of malware infection, even via movies on a site where file ratings are implicitly affected by what you decide about the file after you’ve downloaded it.

SophosLabs showed us a trick that malware distributors are using, where they upload hundreds of video torrents at a time, aggressively building a network of files that they then seed themselves. Some booby-trapped videos have shot rapidly to the top of the seeders’ list, gaining thousands of seeds in a few minutes, thanks to stolen accounts. In other words, the crooks are using other people’s accounts (it doesn’t matter that they’re anonymous) as a vehicle to acquire an organic-looking and believably positive reputation. The trick works, of course, because continuing to seed a file that has no redeeming features nevertheless acts as an upvote. In recent cases we’ve seen using this deception, the malware delivery uses an old trick based on Windows Media Player (WMP). The trick works because WMP allows you to embed web links relating to digital rights inside WMV (Windows Media Video) files. When you try to watch the video, WMP’s Media Usage Rights Acquisition component (a process called mfpmp) will fetch and display the embedded web link.

As a result, you’re faced with a legitimate-looking popup containing a malicious download link, like this one: Amusingly, the hard part of this social engineering exercise is to persuade movie downloaders to run WMP at all, connected as it is with the protection of intellectual property rights. As we have often seen over the past decade, the “hook” in the deception is to pretend that the video won’t play back properly because it needs a special video decoder, rather than because there is a licensing issue that needs WMP to report back to the copyright holder. The installer you download looks harmless enough: What happens next depends on what malware the crooks are being paid to distribute at the time, but here’s an example: In this case, the malware is phishing for your TPB login; if you give away your credentials, the crooks can later use your account to boost their realistic-looking seeders’ list for future malware distributions, and so the process continues. This malware installed additional components, including a utility to turn off User Access Control prompts and then download additional malware.

You’re probably expecting us to repeat our usual advice about using anti-virus software; about avoiding unxepected downloads; about not falling for the old “you need a new codec” story; about using a web filter to prevent malware from calling home; patching promptly; and so on. This time, however, we’ll keep it really old-school: Don’t pirate stuff. You’re welcome. Sophos products detect and block the malware files described here as Troj/Goren-A and Troj/Goren-B. One tends to see (at least so I hear) day or two early uploads of huge numbers of popular TV shows.

Since the occasional show does sometimes appear a day or two early this can look superficially plausible. A clue is there are often reams and reams of these which have all been posted in a ludicrously short time. Seem somehow not to play without some extra web help though Can’t be bothered with software, plenty of free and cheap stuff and I play console but would use Steam and wait for sale days if I were to use PC for games again. In reality it is very easy for someone to distinguise between Malware and video files. Pirating software is quite another story. I do think however that software piracy is not really that common anymore, and most people get windows with their computer, and do not mind paying for O365 subscription to have a legit copy of office for instance.

With music, just listen to Pandora, or Spotify, why pirate it? I think where privacy is still rampant is with video files, and like Pandora and Spotify showed, this wont’ change until the industry changes how it does things. It is not Netflix deciding to geoblock you, it is because they only have a license to show that content in a specific country. They would much rather open their catalog to the whole world. Until the movies and tv shows are available in a easy affordable way, that is charged fairly (like Pandora or spotify) there will be pirates, and pirating video files are really very low risk when it comes to malware. Having an email address is more risky!

I haven’t looked at that part myselfI don’t think it’s an elevation of privilege, just a way of reducing the number of warnings overall (thus disguising quite how much is going on). An analogy is the default behaviour of sudo when it runs a command as root on UNIX/Linux: you have to put in a password once; the password is then cached for 5 minutes. Thich is handy for scripts that are supposed to run a sequence of commands but not so handy if something bad happens (when additional and unexpected password prompts might draw your attention to the problem). More accurately, your advice should be don’t pirate new releases, based on your research, as you have no evidence of widespread malware in older content. Specifically, on TPB rather than elsewhere, as it’s impossible to simply dissuade people pirating if they really want a thing, a rule of thumb for people without infosec skills would be closer to “check the original upload date is at least 6 months ago and there are no reports of included malware in the comments.

The continued inability of the movie industry (and some segments of the video games industry) to compete with piracy in the face of solid evidence it’s possible to do well is depressing. “Deserve” is a word bandied about far too generously these days. “asking for”!== “deserves” If my Mom and I linger on a busy street corner, wallet in hand while we dig for the notes I’ve made about her health condition Yes, I am asking for my wallet to be snatched while I’m distracted.

The word “deserve” does not apply. “ignorance”!== “stupid”!== “jerk” Ignorance is the lack of useful knowledge regarding a given subject–which shares a Venn diagram with stupid but is distinctly different.

Jerks deserve bad things to happen them. If I’m just a caveman–and your modern codecs frighten me–and have never heard of offline backups That doesn’t mean I *deserve* to have my tax documents and charity donation affidavits and SSN ransomwared while my identity is stolen. S Cinema 4d Hair Module R13 Torrent Crack Keys.

In both cases I am ignorant, (debatably) not stupid, but patently not a jerk. HOWEVER if I download free copies of all the music and movies I can consume–while convincing myself it’s a victimless crime (or not a crime at all), simply because others have made it possible–there’s a good chance I’m all three. So I suppose I agree with you after all.

At the beginning of 2017 the torrent landscape looks quite different from a year ago. With the shutdown of KickassTorrents and Torrentz.eu, two of the largest players in the scene disappeared. However, their places were quickly filled by established sites and a few new faces. The Pirate Bay is in the lead once again, closely followed by ExtraTorrent and RARBG, which gained many new visitors in recent months. Must read: The unofficial Torrentz reincarnation Torrentz2.eu is the highest newcomer in fifth place. This meta-search engine copied the look and feel of the defunct meta-search engine and covers dozens of extra sites compared to its predecessor. TorrentProject is also doing well.

The site has been around for quite a few years already but never made it into the top ten before. Finally, and also deserve a mention. Both have enough traffic to warrant a listing, but we chose to limit the list to sites that are targeted at mainstream content for an English or international audience. Below is the full list of the ten most-visited torrent sites at the start of the new year. The list is based on various traffic reports and we display the Alexa rank for each. In addition, we include last year’s ranking.

Most Popular Torrent Sites 1. The Pirate Bay is the “king of torrents” once again and also the oldest site in this list. The past year has been relatively quiet for the notorious torrent site, which is currently operating from its original.org domain name.

More Information The Pirate Bay has been blocked on many ISP's accross Europe. The Proxy Bay maintains a list of proxy sites that allow access to The Pirate Bay. These proxy sites are hosted in countries where The Pirate Bay has not been blocked. There is more information about the blocks on Proxy sites are the easiest methods to bypass the block. Check the for other ways of accessing The Pirate Bay Another list of proxy sites can be found at If you want to help, you can also create your own proxy site. There are instructions for setting up a simple proxy (using a PHP script) and advanced method using NGINX as a reverse proxy.

See the instructions.