GData reports massive increase in malicious torrents

 

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Posted on 8 Sep 2009 at 12:31

The number of infected torrents tripled over the course of last week, according to German security software firm GData. G Data Security Labs' analysis reports that a lot of malware is circulating in software warez (cracked versions of commercial software), maps for navigation devices, ringer tones, videos, and music recordings.

The most noteworthy source of infected torrents has been torrentreactor.net. Already one of the most frequent sources of malicious torrents, torrentreactor.net racked up 2,400 occurrences in just three days last week. By comparison, there were just 9,400 reported malware files among all torrent sharing services in the entire preceding month. GData anticipates that, should this trend continue, malicious torrent will at least double last month's total.

Ralf Benzm?ller, manager of G Data Security Labs, warns, "Against the backdrop of the current figures, we can only warn all Internet users against using peer-to-peer and torrent downloads. Aside from any possible copyright problems associated with the downloading of warez, there is an increased risk that the downloads are infected with malware."

This is fair advice. It's pretty obvious that there's a certain element of risk inherent in downloading dodgy cracked software or pirated films and music. If your primary use of torrents is to download legitimate software (and we're sure it is), you should be able to download the torrent file from the program's own website, such as the torrents page for Slackware Linux.

Author: Kat Orphanides