Every day thousands of “fake” torrents are uploaded from malicious sources, often labeled with the names of popular movies or TV-shows. Needless to say, those who download these torrents don’t get what they were looking for. Instead they are redirected to scam websites or lured into installing malware.

One of the prime platforms where these fake torrents are published is without doubt The Pirate Bay. To measure the scope of this problem and what can be done about it, a group of researchers decided to monitor all Pirate Bay uploads. The just-published results (pdf) are rather surprising.

During a two week period the researchers collected a total of 29,330 torrent files and found that 12,209 were “fake” and eventually removed from The Pirate Bay. Put differently, one in three torrent files uploaded to The Pirate Bay links to malware or scams of some kind.

This result may be surprising to many Pirate Bay users as these fake files rarely stay on the site for long. Moderators tend to delete the torrents in question within minutes or hours, but according to the researchers this is too late for the many people who’ve already started downloading the files.

The researchers estimate that in a year’s time millions of people will be downloading these fake files. Interestingly, people from the US, China and Brazil fall for these scams more than the average downloader. BitTorrent users from Spain, India and Great Britain on the other hand are best at avoiding them.

The researchers believe the mass distribution of these fake files poses a serious threat to the security of Internet users, but luckily they’ve also come up with a solution.

In addition to describing and analyzing the fake torrent phenomenon, the researchers have also developed a tool that allows BitTorrent users to check torrents before they’re downloaded. Their TorrentGuard application is available as a Vuze plugin and users can also test torrents via the website.

The researchers are able to accurately identify fake torrents because the vast majority of the files are uploaded by a small group of uploaders. They found that 90% of all fake files were initially seeded by just 20 different IP-addresses. By using the TorrentGuard tool, the researchers estimate that 10 million fake downloads per year can be prevented.

Talking to TorrentFreak, researcher Rubén Cuevas of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid explains that the research is important because it reveals the threat posed by these fake torrents. He hopes that more researchers will take this aspect of cyber-security seriously and that the research presents an opportunity to educate the public.

“Of course skilled users are aware of these risks and are able to identify fake torrents in most cases. However, a large percentage of BitTorrent users are unskilled and not capable of distinguishing between legitimate and fake torrents.”

“We hope that our research is able to make at least a fraction of the unskilled users aware of this threat, so that they become more careful when selecting the torrents to download,” Cuevas says.

Ideally, the research team would like BitTorrent portals and trackers to cooperate.

“In order to make TorrentGuard even more efficient, we would need the collaboration of both BitTorrent portals and BitTorrent trackers,” Cuevas told TorrentFreak.

This would not only make the TorrentGuard tool more effective, it would also prevent even more fake torrents from spreading as BitTorrent sites would be able to detect them earlier.

The Pirate Bay team informed TorrentFreak that they are interested in collaborating, especially if doing so can prevent millions of people from falling for these scams. OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent, the two largest public BitTorrent trackers, have also indicated that they want to work with the researchers to improve the tool.

If the collaboration leads to a practical solution which is adopted across all popular BitTorrent portals, the researchers predict that 35 million fake downloads can be prevented, making the Internet a safer place for all.

More information on TorrentGuard is available at the official website.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

We also reported on BitTorrent clients such as Torrent101, BitRoll and GetTorrent, which also caused caused a whole load of trouble for those who installed them – even uTorrent and WinZip users were in the sights of malware offloaders.

In an email yesterday to TorrentFreak, a reader pointed us to a problem torrent located here (removed). The file is clearly labeled as ‘The Wolfman DVDrip 2010 aXXo’ but it is a fake, a fact which can be quickly learned by reading the comments underneath the torrent. Nevertheless, we thought it might be interesting to demonstrate how it’s possible to look a little deeper.

The file is tracked by a whole range of trackers but one sticks out immediately.

http://tracker.torrentq.com/announce.php currently lists 48,416 seeds and 37,496 seeders for the supposed ‘The Wolfman’ movie, a highly attractive proposition for those inexperienced in dealing with fake torrents.

Of course the stats are faked, and are run from a tracker set up especially to deliver fake torrents. Indeed, it’s run on a subdomain of TorrentQ, a bad client we featured in an earlier article. Here’s a quick step-by-step of the method we used to investigate the tracker. There are other ways, but this is pretty simple so anyone can try this out.

It’s possible to find information about the files indexed on many trackers by using ‘scrape’. In the case of the TorrentQ tracker, the scrape URL is located at http://tracker.torrentq.com/scrape.php. So first off, go to this URL and you’ll get the option to download a file, in this case ‘scrape.php’ – download it.

In this file will be information about the files being seeded on this tracker.

Next use DeHackEd’s nice little online tool called DumpTorrentCGI. Browse to the ‘scrape’ file on your hard drive, change output type to ‘/scrape’ and click the ‘decode’ button. You should get this report;

Immediately you can see that all the files are apparently hugely popular, but of course, all of these stats are faked. To prove that, one can use a site like Torrentz.com, which creates its torrent URLs by using a torrent’s hash value. Simply test each torrent by using http://www.torrentz.com/ followed by the hash value, as shown below, and check the comments.

http://www.torrentz.com/0366eb6bdbab88f2ccd9397a0b421b3947c82e06

The torrents TorrentQ tracks are for Wolfman, Legion, My Name is Khan, The Book of Eli, From Paris With Love, Ninja Assassin, Edge of Darkness, Shutter Island and Dear John.

Every single one is flagged as a fake by commenters on Torrentz.com.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.