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. On TPB, in contrast, un-seeding a file is effectively an automatic “Unlike.” Fake seeds 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. This is interestingly different sort of self-correcting recommendation system to most mainstream sites. In online piracy, as in many things, nothing breeds success like success.Ī 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.Īfter 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.
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:
So, just how dangerous are TPB video downloads? 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. Therefore risky downloads ought to drop quickly off the list.
A remix of Apple’s iWork software suite (back before it was free) that included malware called OSX/Iworks-A.In recent years, however, pirated software has deliberately and regularly, if not frequently, been used to spread malware.Ĭrooks 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. Pirated software turned out to be a much less dangerous vector for virus infection than people first assumed.
Most virus infections, in fact, came from data disks, or even from otherwise blank disks, that contained what were known as boot sector viruses.Įvery 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 boot sector loaded. 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. 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.
Thanks to Andrew O’Donnell of SophosLabs for his behind-the-scenes work on this article.īack in the early days of computer viruses, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, advice on how to avoid infection often started like this: