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Torrent Sites Earned $70M After Dropping Malware On Visitors (softpedia.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the all-about-the-benjamins dept.

jones_supa writes: One in three torrent sites is spreading malware, claims a recent joint report (PDF) from Digital Citizens Alliance and RiskIQ, which compiled data from over 800 sites. Most of the time, the sites expose visitors to drive-by attacks that silently download malicious files on computers without any user interaction. These types of attacks are usually carried out through malvertising campaigns. It turns out that this is actually a good business for the operators of the pirate sites: depending on traffic, they can make between $200 and $5,000 per day. In total it is estimated that this type of covert agreement between malware distributors and pirate site operators has pocketed the latter about $70 million per year.

3 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Okay, so... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I smell scaremongering rather than actual facts. There are no examples or case studies, just random numbers extrapolated to create a narrative and big money numbers.

    What I'm surprised about is no "tech" site picking up the mining code running in hidden iframes on websites. It's bad enough with auto-playing videos for "affiliates", but now sites are trying to steal CPU cycles on our machines so they can create a billionth of a bitcoin every other year.

  2. And this is why I will never trust ads ... by gstoddart · · Score: 3, Interesting

    These types of attacks account for 45% of all malware infections and are usually carried out through infected ads in so-called malvertising campaigns.

    And this shit is why I will never, ever be willing to treat ads as anything but malicious and dangerous affronts to my privacy and security.

    I lump all analytics and ads into the same bucket: evil greedy bastards who I will never trust, never allow to run scripts, and whose content I will block as long as I have the means. Because, quite frankly, I don't see the difference between the "legitimate" ones and the "shady" ones.

    The only way to win is not even play. Once you start running blocking stuff and realize the amount of shit embedded in every web page, you just treat them all as parasites or shit on your shoe: you remove them with extreme prejudice.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  3. Re:Never trust torrent sites by operagost · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ^ This. "Legitimate" sites inject malware into downloads and somehow escape the FTC year after year.

    --

    Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.