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Showing posts from April, 2019

Botnet spamming The Pirate Bay with malware

Over the last few weeks, a botnet has been mass-uploading a specific package of what appears to be malware (I haven't had time to look at the payload itself yet). Cleverly, the person(s) behind this effort have appeared to scrape filenames from titles that have already been pirated by popular uploaders. Stupidly, each download uses an obviously fraudulent filesize of 8.04MB. Videogames have not been that small for decades. This mistake would have been less obvious if not for the fact that the same user account - halfax - has uploaded dozens and dozens of games with the exact same filesize. Adding to the obvious fraud behind this effort is the number of nodes sharing these bad files. A screenshot of the current front page of the Games listing for TPB shows the disparity in the number of Seeders and Leachers between files shared by actual pirates and those shared by "halfax": Notice how, although there is variation in the number of seeders and leechers, the varia