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Trojan Found At Torrent Sites Insists "Downloading Is Wrong"

Posted by Soulskill on from the attack-of-conscience dept.

NoisySplatter writes "Ernesto, founder of TorrentFreak, reports that a new trojan, 'Troj/Qhost-AC,' has been distributed on The Pirate Bay. The virus was disguised as a serial key generator, and the offending torrent has since been removed, but the source has not been identified. Troj/Qhost-AC makes changes to the user's hosts file that redirects The Pirate Bay, Suprbay, and Mininova to 127.0.0.1. In addition to making three popular torrent sites inaccessible, the virus also plays a sound file that says: 'downloading is wrong.' It looks like someone has finally stepped up to the plate to challenge Madonna for the title of 'Most Obnoxious Anti-Piracy Stunt.' Of course, this could just be the software industry's attempt at outdoing the RIAA and MPAA."

7 of 345 comments (clear)

  1. Please explain to me by mumblestheclown · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'd like somebody to please explain to me why my company should not compile versions of our software for torrent that do horrible and terrible things to the downloaders' PCs after say, the third run. We have no duty of care nor contract with such downloaders and due to the nature of our software, it is 100% certain that those who download pirated versions will never become legitimate customers. Furthermore, because of the way our software is licensed and its data is accessed, we can be 100% sure that none of our legitimate users are using pirated versions. No really. I'd like you guys to tell me why not. it's something I've fantasized about. We'd even put noticed at the beginning of the software telling the user quite explicitly about the horrible things that the software would do, and we would not hold the users "hostage" to purchasing our software in any way. Of course, we could open ourselves up to retribution attacks, but, imagining for a moment if that was not an issue, i'd like to hear some opinions. As you can see by the responses here to this article, many slashdotters have abandoned even the pretense of soome pseudophilosophical justification for their piracy and are just concentrating on the technical tricks involved in being better pirates ("virtual machines, baby", etc.)

    1. Re:Please explain to me by Firehed · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Some Mac software developer claimed to do this a while ago on his small commercial product (a completely harmless dialog box saying something to the effect of "pirated key detected, erasing your hard drive"). He had to open-source the product - thereby completely killing its revenue stream - just to save face, and suffice to say a lot of people that remember the incident better than I avoid any software from this developer.

      I assure you, NOT all publicity is good publicity, despite sayings to the contrary.

      So go for it, but don't be surprised if it ends up completely killing the product. It sounds like you've got some sort of enterprisey product, and I guarantee that no sane company would even risk continuing to use your product (never mind getting any future business) if there was even the slightest risk of that happening.

      --
      How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
    2. Re:Please explain to me by Tom9729 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Because boobytrapping your software would be the equivalent of having a robot shoot the person on the other side of the register when the silent alarm was triggered.

      Works great, but once it's triggered it doesn't differentiate between customers and criminals.

      Say there's a bug in your software that causes it to format the customer's computer because it mistakenly thought they were a criminal. That's a big "oops".

  2. Re:Running as admin is fun by dov_0 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Far out. I'll slap the next person who tells me Unix is hard to use, if that's Microsoft's idea of user-friendliness.

    From someone who runs a PC repair business, XP makes Unix look like childs play... Man it even makes doing a Gentoo install look easy.

    Give me a nice clean bash terminal any day.

    --
    sudo mount --milk --sugar /cup/tea /mouth /etc/init.d/relax start
  3. Here you go by temcat · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You have said it yourself: "it is 100% certain that those who download pirated versions will never become legitimate customers." Ergo, the real damage (loss of profits) from those pirates incurred by you is exactly zero. On the other hand, you are going to inflict some real, very non-zero damage to these people by your hypothetical actions. Therefore these actions would be wrong even if we are to disregard all PR and legal reasons already cited by others here.

  4. Re:Nice by Crizp · · Score: 4, Interesting

    naninaniyo
    anatanobakayo
    urusaiyo

    Sorry. I have no idea what I'm doing.

  5. Downloading is wrong? by nurb432 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Tell that to SourceForge.

    If these people are caught with ties to any industry the FTC needs to come down on them, hard.

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----