Malware-laden BitTorrent clients
p2pnet.net news:- Torrent101, Torrentq and Bitroll are three malware supported BitTorrent clients which are heavily advertised on BitTorrent sites. They try to lure naive users into downloading these clients wiith catchy phrases like ‘We use unique technology to increase the download speed of your torrents’. We decided to turn the tables around and advertised with malware warnings on their websites.
How? Well, we started to run Google Adwords campaigns on the Bitroll, Torrent101 and Torrentq websites. In just four days the ads were shown 20,000 times, the clickthrough rate was impressive, and the ads probably prevented more than one thousand people installing these malware-laden BitTorrent clients.
Of course these campaigns were just for fun. It was nice to turn their advertising strategy against them, and help some naive BitTorrent users along the way.
However, the downside of it all is they now make money off my ads, which allows them to advertise their crappy BitTorrent clients on other websites, so it’s not really an optimal solution.
Here’s an example of the TorrentFreak ad on the Torrent101 website. If people clicked the link, they were directed to this post about Torrent101.
Luckily, most BitTorrent site admins don’t allow ads for these shady clients on their sites.
Brokep from The Pirate Bay said earlier ‘We’re getting a lot of email about people downloading torrent clients that are advertised on the site. Do not download them! We have put a ban for the ad companies to sell ads for these clients on our site,’ and the admins of mininova and btjunkie also banned all ads for these BitTorrent clients on their websites.
People need to be aware that these clients can seriously mess-up up your computer, and the Google adwords campaigns were a fun way to do this.
I’m happy to see that Google search is giving a helping hand as well, for free.
Torrentfreak – The Netherlands
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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
April 23rd, 2007 at 6:26 am
Anyone that USES these sites to get a BT client anyway is stupid. There are freely available and BETTER BT clients all over the net….so someone using one of these clients have to be really dumb.
April 23rd, 2007 at 7:09 am
Any torrent that lists rar files should be disregarded unless there is a password provided. The reason for this is that the info files usually give instructions for one to download one of these shady clients in order to be provided the password for the rar archive. I wish that torrent sites would ban hosting of torrents that index password protected archives.
April 23rd, 2007 at 9:48 am
dear anonymous,
first of all, the source where the stuff comes from is always a RAR archive. Original archives DO not contain passwords. If they do, then these are recycled shit from wannebee guys.
If you stumble across such a recycled shit with a password that is not provided in the decription field on TPB for example, report those torrents and they will get deleted after being reported.
To play those torrents that are created with original “scene” source RARs, you can use the Dziobas Rar Player that is based on FLOSS Software!
April 23rd, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Thanks for the info. I will start reporting.