Fake Gaming Torrents Download Unwanted Apps Instead of Popular Games (helpnetsecurity.com)

Reader Orome1 writes: If you're looking for torrents to download pirated copies of popular games, be extra careful not to be tricked into downloading malicious and unwanted software instead. According to Symantec researchers, who have been trawling popular torrent websites, there's an active distribution campaign going on that delivers potentially unwanted apps posing as torrents for games like Assassin's Creed Syndicate, The Witcher 3, World of Warcraft: Legion, The Walking Dead: Michonne, and several others. At first glance, the torrent does not seem suspicious -- its size is as small as expected from a torrent file. After saying "Yes" to the UAC security dialogue that asks if they are sure they want to allow the program to make changes to the computer, users end up with a file downloaded from a Google Drive -- a file that is considerably larger than a torrent file (around 3.5 MB) and is obviously an executable.

Comments

Don't be dumb

[just another AC]

But that Nigerian prince seemed so nice!

People on the internet will try to take advantage of you. I am shocked.

(and this was the number one infection vector in the 90s... so this being news is like a patent being new because it is "in the cloud")

Hmm

[The MAZZTer]

Not clear to me how it goes from being a torrent file to a file downloaded from Google Drive. My only guess is it's not a torrent file but a .url file which lniks to the .exe mentioned. And this is incredibly easy to detect simply by knowing what you're expecting to get, and aborting when you see something unexpected (eg it's not actually a torrent file. the "torrent" didn't download what I expected, what it actually downloaded is incredibly suspicious). There are multiple opportunities to avoid getting infected, including the UAC dialog mentioned which should be a HUGE red flag.