Thousands of uTorrent users got a worrying message from their antivirus software recently. Their favorite BitTorrent client was recognized as a trojan by Avast, and deleted form their computers. Attempts to redownload the software from uTorrent.com resulted in the same trojan warning.
New data on the ever changing P2P landscape shows that the number of uTorrent users worldwide has more than doubled compared to last year. The BitTorrent client is most popular in Europe - with an install rate of 11.6% - and least popular in the United States, where 5.1% of the PCs have uTorrent installed.
In the US, several universities have banned filesharing applications such as BitTorrent, mostly under pressure from the RIAA. A university in the Netherlands has taken a different approach. They use uTorrent to distribute software and OS updates across 6500 workstations, and end up saving a lot of time, money and resources by doing so.
The uTorrent development team just released 1.7.7 stable. The new version is the latest 1.7 release, and fixes the vulnerability that allowed attackers to remotely crash the BitTorrent client.
Both the official BitTorrent and uTorrent clients are vulnerable to a remote denial-of-service attack, due to the way they handle user-supplied data. Versions found to be vulnerable so far are the official BitTorrent 6.0 client,
uTorrent 1.7.x, uTorrent 1.6.x and uTorrent 1.8-alpha-7834.
A recent reports suggests that the BitTorrent DNA, which is bundled with the mainline client, is an “exploitable” version of uTorrent without the user interface. It is suggested that it is possible for any websites to offload content to the btdna.exe, without the user’s consent.
Opera, the popular multi-platform browser has supported BitTorrent for some time now. After more than a year of development, the release of v9.50 Alpha sees the introduction of a uTorrent compatible Peer Exchange feature which will hopefully help to speed up transfers and reduce tracker load.
P2P ’scam sites’ masquerade as genuine file-sharing sites but con inexperienced file-sharers into paying ’subscriptions’ for free software, such as BitTorrent clients and bombard them with ads and popups. uTorrent has had enough of one such site making profit from their work and is stepping up to the mark to hold them accountable.
BitTorrent is great, but all those downloaded torrents have the habit of making a mess of your harddrive. Do you still have all your downloaded stuff in a single folder? Take action, organize your torrents.
