Hacking

Torrent Risks: How to get infected through torrent with a good reputation

Experts at Z-Lab Yoroi/Cybaze have conducted an interesting analysis on the risks for users downloading films, games, and software through Torrent.

Digital media sharing is one of the most relevant phenomena since the advent of the internet. During the 80’s and 90’s, with the rapid growth the Internet, people around the world started sharing digital stuff protected by copyright, through particular communication protocols and programs such as FTP, IRC, etc.

At the time, only a few people had the capability to access to these illegal networks. Today the situation is quite different, it is very easy to share any kind of content through simplified file-sharing services making it easy to obtain copyrighted material and pirated copies of popular software.

Cybaze-Yoroi Z-Lab researchers conducted a study on the risks related to the use of the BitTorrent protocol to download movies, games or pirated software. The analysis shed the light on the risk faced by users while searching for movies, games, and software on popular BitTorrent trackers. The experts analyzed dozens of torrents and discovered that most of them are delivered in bundle with malware or Adware, exposing at risk of infection the average user with a few interactions.

In this analysis, researcher downloaded torrents belonging to 3 different categories of interest: Movies, Games and Software. They searched for 2 highly anticipated films : “The Avengers 4” and “Joker” for the “Movies” category, for the “Games” category they search for “Fortnite”, one of the most played videogame and, for the “Software” category they searched for some of the most requested software of this moment, “Nero Burning Rom”, “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom” and “Malwarebytes Premium”.

Experts discovered that most of the torrents contains well-known malware that are currently detected by most anti-viruses and, also, most of the malicious torrents have a good reputation in terms of seeders. In the BitTorrent terminology, seeders are …

Download the full White Paper “Torrent Risks: An Analysis by Z-Lab Yoroi / Cybaze”

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – SDMSniff point-of-sale malware )

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

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