One of its victims, who got the trojan from downloading a torrent from The Pirate Bay, contacted TorrentFreak. He told us: “I didn’t follow the well established rules of downloading. It was a file with a low number of seeds, many leechers and no comments. I’ve downloaded the file and didn’t visit the torrent page again to view if there were any negative comments.”

It turned out that the trojan originated from a keygen supplied with a copy of pirated software. Instead of generating a key, it modified the hosts file of the computer so that it redirects The Pirate Bay, Suprbay (The Pirate Bay forums) and Mininova to 127.0.0.1, which means that the sites never load.

Aside from blocking the three sites in question, the trojan caused popups and even played a sound file saying that “downloading is wrong”. The bad torrent was removed from The Pirate Bay soon after users commented that the key generator didn’t work, but it is safe to assume that this is not the first and only attempt to spread a trojan like this one.

The question remains, who is behind this? While some might argue that the MPAA, RIAA or other anti-piracy advocates might be the source, we think it more likely that the attack originates from a relatively innocent prankster targeting pirates.

The good news is that it is fairly easy to fix, manually removing the entries from the hosts file solves the problem. “Overall a bad experience, but the computer is fine now,” the affected user told us. Advice and tips about the Windows Hosts file can be found here.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

German authorities weren’t too happy about the leak, which might be illegal according to a criminal law specialist, and went after the source. Earlier this week police searched the home of the Pirate Party spokesperson where they hoped to find more information. In addition to the home search, a server from another party member was seized. The server, however, was fully encrypted, so chances are low that it will uncover the whistleblower.

In a response, Andreas Popp, Chairman of the Bavarian Pirate Party said: “A brave person leaks documents to the Pirate Party, to inform the public about a procedure of the Bavarian Government, which is highly likely to violate the constitution. Now this persons is hunted like a criminal. Private rooms are raided, servers get seized.”

Pirate Parties around the world will continue to speak out against these, and other privacy threats. The trojan in question (German) was able to tap into Skype calls and intercept traffic to encrypted websites.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Such ‘false positives’ often happen with other harmless applications – better safe than sorry- but since uTorrent doubled its user base in just 12 months and is installed on millions of computers, this problem affected a sizable number of people. It didn’t take long before the issue was reported to Avast, and after approximately 5 hours the problem was fixed.

Earlier this week it became clear that uTorrent’s WebUI (+ Azureus and TorrentFlux) were vulnerable to several exploits. Apparently the vulnerabilities in the webUI, allow outsiders to take over uTorrent and download random content onto one’s system.

uTorrent developer Greg Hazel told TorrentFreak that he is aware of the issue and working on a fix. For now, the BitTorrent client itself is perfectly safe and secure.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

First the MPAA’s DVD sniffing dogs, now a trojan that’s targeting P2P content. Although the creators of the trojan are unknown until now, my guess is that the MPAA will be quite delighted.

Graham Cluley of Sophos, the company that discovered the virus, commented:

“The Erazer Trojan is a vigilante worthy of a Charles Bronson movie, taking the law into its own hands. However, it’s perfectly possible for the Trojan to aim poorly and wipe out innocent files too”.

As far as I know BitTorrent is safe, for now.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.