TorrentFreak

Every year, tens of thousands of people are scammed into paying for free file-sharing software. Over the years this has evolved into a multi-million dollar business damaging legitimate American companies such as BitTorrent, FrostWire and Vuze. So why is ICE not seizing the domain names of these known scammers? Or viewing it from another angle, perhaps SOPA might come in handy after all…

Earlier today, the websites of BitTorrent Inc. (utorrent.com and bittorrent.com) were hacked. In what would seem (but isn’t) to be a vindication of the many ‘studies‘ equating P2P with malware, downloads of the torrent clients µTorrent and BitTorrent (aka mainline) were replaced with malware downloads. Shortly after this had happened, BitTorrent Inc. took the servers [...]

A few hours ago, certain sections of The Pirate Bay were flagged by Google as containing malware and were subsequently blocked. Similar warnings are being shown by Firefox, which states that the world’s largest tracker is an “attack site”. The Pirate Bay team are working on the problem now.

A new BitTorrent site has appeared which will allow scammers and spammers to infect its users with spyware, malware and viruses. An admin of TrafficLoader.com says that no bad torrents will ever be removed from the site and is inviting people to upload malicious software to infect torrent users.

Described as “One of the most prevalent pieces of malware in the last three years,” the Downloader-UA.h trojan is running wild on P2P networks. But thanks to its system strength – and the work of torrent site moderators – such outbreaks are shrugged off by BitTorrent.

Internet connection and hardware aside, everything the file-sharer needs to share files comes free of charge – clients, media players, everything is free – so BitTorrent users beware: If you find yourself being asked to use your cellphone to ‘unlock’ something you downloaded, you are being scammed!

The best torrent software clients like uTorrent or Azureus are free, no strings attached. However, some companies are making money tricking novice users into installing bad clients, bad media players and even bad Winzip-like software. We expose them and their badware and show you how to block them.