Trojan Found At Torrent Sites Insists "Downloading Is Wrong" 345
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."
Re:Keygens (Score:2, Interesting)
I rely on feedback from other downloaders on TPB. If the installer or keygen do bad things, many people will scream in comments. For popular torrents that are more than a month old, that catches malware pretty well. So far, I've no visible problem on my machine with this approach.
Please explain to me (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Please explain to me (Score:3, 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.
Re:Running as admin is fun (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.
Re:Please explain to me (Score:4, 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".
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nice (Score:5, Interesting)
naninaniyo
anatanobakayo
urusaiyo
Sorry. I have no idea what I'm doing.
Re:Please explain to me (Score:1, Interesting)
Equating copyright infringement with stealing is quite wacky, but comparing it with assault and murder is quite another!
And then there's the problem, that breaking and entering into a computer system is a whole other league than copyright infringement. Your 10, 100 or even 1000$ program doesn't even come close to the worth of my data, so such vigilant actions are, at best, hugely excessive.
Third, talking about rights. You have the right to unauthorized computer manipulation as I have the right to kill you when you steal a candy from me. As in none at all.
Downloading is wrong? (Score:4, Interesting)
Tell that to SourceForge.
If these people are caught with ties to any industry the FTC needs to come down on them, hard.