TorrentSpy Advertises Malicious BitTorrent Client
Running a BitTorrent site can get pretty expensive, especially when you’re caught up in a lawsuit with the MPAA. But, recommending malicious BitTorrent clients like Get-Torrent to your users is not the solution, not even if they pay $$ per install. Money corrupts?
Get-Torrent is one of the many malicious BitTorrent clients that are advertised on torrent sites. The clients, and a lot of other free malware applications, are developed and spread by a Swedish company named Wakenet. Their primary goal is to trap people into downloading applications that look useful, just to infect computers with adware bundles that are hard to uninstall.
Various forum threads, even on TorrentSpy, warn naive users about these clients. Still, TorrentSpy is actively advertising Get-Torrent, and infecting hundreds of their users’ computers, resulting in a torrent of annoying popups.
Unlike TorrentSpy, most BitTorrent site admins refuse to advertise these clients. The Pirate Bay and mininova successfully banned these malicious clients from advertising through Adbrite, and BTjunkie and many other sites wont let them on their site either.
The malware bundled with BitTorrent clients like Get-Torrent, Torrent101, TorrentQ and BitRoll is a sponsor program called “Cidhelp”. Apparently, it can be easily removed from the Windows Control Panel. However, in most cases your anti-spyware or anti-virus program damaged the files, leaving them impossible to uninstall, while they still cause numerous popups.
In April we ran a Google Adwords campaigns on the Bitroll, Torrent101 and Torrentq websites warning users not to install these clients. Even though it was fun and probably prevented a couple of hundred people from installing the clients, it is far from an ideal solution. The best way is to spread the word, start forum threads and write blog posts or emails to warn others.
