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Demonoid Down For a Week, Serving Malware Laden Ads
hypnosec tipped us to reports that Demonoid is still down after a suffering a massive DDoS last week, and that the domain is now redirecting to a malware-ridden spam site. Notable for surviving a CRIA mandated shutdown, this may be lights out for the torrent tracker: "To begin, while Demonoid’s admin told us that he would eventually bring the site back online, he clearly has other things on his mind. A really important family event puts a torrent site nowhere near the top of his priorities. ... Demonoid has been experiencing staffing issues this year. As we mentioned in an earlier article, there were rumors that one or maybe more Demonoid staffers had been questioned by authorities about their involvement in the site."
I've always been forced (by means of parental guilt-trip) to act as tech-support for family, which basically means being the guy who gets roped into decontaminated malware-laden PCs for them, despite the fact I'm in a full time job and earn more than most of them. Yes, the whole "being the guy who knows PCs" thing is really starting to grate as I move further into my 30s, not least because my knowledge is nowhere near as fresh or as deep as it was a decade ago.
Anyway, rant aside, I've been used to dealing with calls about stuff like this maybe 3 or 4 times a year. And now in the last week, I've had two calls from extended family, both relating to infections acquired from the redirected Demonoid. I'm really seething about this - we're talking about people a generation older than I am, with jobs, who are still getting infections from piracy sites. For a decade now, I've been operating on the basis of "Do I need it? If not, do I want it? Can I justify spending money on it? And if not, is there a free-as-in-beer legal alternative available?"
Anyway, I've said I'll "help" with these infections at the weekend. But I'm not going to be spending hours running malware removal kits and trawling through registries. If they have legal Windows reinstall discs, then fine. If not (and I'll bet they don't), they'll be going out to the shops to buy them and then doing format/reinstalls. Backups? Any that they hadn't made pre-infection (and they won't have done any) will, I shall argue, pose too much of a risk of reinfection (which might even be true).
Might encourage them to think twice next time. But probably won't.