Here at TorrentFreak we get a few emails each week announcing the arrival of new BitTorrent sites but there are so many, we can’t possibly write about them all. Instead, due to time limitations, we write about ones which are topical in some way or offer some interesting or unique features. Today we report on a new torrent site which does indeed have an interesting feature, although most won’t appreciate it.
One of the main drawbacks of using P2P software such as Limewire, is that the content on the network (Gnutella) is unmoderated – anyone is free to put up whatever they like, be it music, movies or TV shows. Of course, others use this lack of moderation as a green light to upload viruses, spyware and other malicious software. Equally, one of the great strengths of BitTorrent (at least from a harm-reduction point of view), is that .torrent files are uploaded to torrent sites where staff work hard to filter out as much of the malicious software as they can, making BitTorrent relatively malware-free.
Of course, this great system falls apart if you can’t trust the people running the site. People expect anti-pirates like MiiVi to be ‘the enemy within’, but who needs those when you have ‘friends’ like the guys at new torrent site, TrafficLoader.com.
TrafficLoader.com (and its forum, pdls.info) hasn’t been setup for the benefit of BitTorrent users, it will be used by spammers, scammers and virus peddlers to spread their malicious software among the community (and make money off it). One of the admins called ‘Satty’ says that no registration is needed to upload torrents to the site and none will ever be removed. The site does have a notice – ‘Viruses, spyware, affiliate links and everything related is strictly prohibited’ but don’t believe it – Satty says these rules don’t apply to his friends in the PPI (Pay Per Install) community.
A few days ago the site was pretty bare with relatively few torrents and it was clear that most of them contained malware. It was suggested to Satty that it might be a good idea to have some genuine torrents too, to help disguise the bad torrents. Now things are starting to ‘improve’ on the site with many more torrents added recently which don’t immediately appear to be malware.
In the last few days, TrafficLoader cosmetically ‘cleaned up’ the site to remove porn adverts in order to appear more genuine but unfortunately, someone as well as TorrentFreak noticed that they made a big mistake:
“Why would you [Satty, admin] put a forum for ppi on a publicly scraped site, a.k.a here?? Do you just want ppl to find out shit is full of malware?”
Just in case they did want people to find out, hopefully this post will help them get the word out.
For those that want advice on how to avoid bad torrents in the future, try one of our guides.
Update: The site was taken offline a few hours after this article was posted, that’s our good deed for the weekend.
