Malicious BitTorrent Clients: New Coat of Paint, Same Bad Story
It seems that hardly a month goes by without another malicious BitTorrent client appearing for download, hoping to dupe inexperienced and unsuspecting file-sharers into installing malware. As new kid on the block ‘Get-Torrent’ hits the web, we scratch below the surface to find the same old malware and the same old story.
In January, we reported on two malware-loaded BitTorrent clients, Torrent101 and Bitroll. Both clients promised ‘high speed downloads’ but actually install a payload of malware onto the victim’s PC.
Unfortunately, several popular torrent sites carried advertising for these bad clients but thankfully, sites like The Pirate Bay saw the damage these things can cause and removed the adverts. TPB’s brokep wrote, “We’re getting a lot of email about people downloading torrent clients that are advertised on the site. Do not download them! We have put a ban for the ad companies to sell ads for these clients on our site.” Mininova and Snarf-it also blocked the adverts.
In February, we reported on yet another client, TorrentQ after a tip-off from the owner of BT-Junkie. Of course, this wasn’t a new client but the old one with a new name.
In April, in order to try to save unsuspecting file-sharers from installing malware, we ran Google Adword campaigns on the BitRoll, Torrent101 and TorrentQ websites, informing people of just how bad these clients are. Google apparantly doesn’t like to be associated with bad news and a few days later, Adsense adverts disappeared from the sites.
Disappointingly, we are now exposed to yet another ‘new’ bad torrent client. Get-Torrent is the latest in a sequence of malware-laden torrent clients, cloned from the same infected DNA as BitRoll, Torrent101 and TorrentQ. As can be seen from the client’s ‘skinning’ pages, these products are identical;
As we promised in our earlier posts, every time a bad client appears we will do our best to let the BitTorrent community know about it. Anyone thinking of installing a BitTorrent client should stay away from these products and install a free, clean client, such as uTorrent.
