BitTorrent Spammers Target The Pirate Bay
BitTorrent Spammers Target The Pirate Bay
With millions
of page views a day, torrent sites are a great outlet for spammers and
scammers. Most recently, The Pirate Bay suffered from a spam flood.
Thousands of spam comments posted on the site promised to speed up
BitTorrent downloads to unrealistic heights, while installing an
aggressive adware bundle.
Over the years we’ve posted many articles on all sorts of scams and spam attacks targeted at BitTorrent users, ranging from malware infested BitTorrent clients to fake
copyright infringement warnings. Taken together, all these rogue
projects have generated millions of dollars while leaving many
BitTorrent users dissatisfied.
One of the more recent attacks targets the weak spot of the average
BitTorrent user, as it promises to increase the download speed of one’s
torrents significantly. By registering hundreds of bogus accounts,
BitTorrentBooster(.com) spammed the torrent comments on The Pirate Bay
and other torrent sites with the same fake promises.
“Try BitTorrentBooster and increase you download speed by UP TO
100%,” they claim - all while quietly promoting their adware package,
or they embed an image similar to the one below.
The moderators at The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak that they do all
they can to get rid on the spammers by banning IP-addresses, images and
optimizing the spam filter. However, the BitTorrentBooster folks keep
coming back with more aggressive and less obtrusive comments to promote
their adware. Unfortunately, hundreds of naive BitTorrent users fall
for their speed trap.
This magic speed increase is never going to happen of course. If a
BitTorrent client is configured correctly, most users will easily max
out their connection if the swarm is healthy enough, or they will at
least come close to the average swarm speed. Simply put, there is no
application that can miraculously boost your BitTorrent speed by 100%
like BitTorrentBooster promises.
Nevertheless, there are always people who want to try these things
out to see whether the application makes a difference or not. The site
offers several memberships, including a free one that claims it will
still increase your download speeds by 15%. However, that’s not all it
does - the adware bundle that comes with it is guaranteed to annoy
anyone who installs it.
As stated
in the application’s EULA, every user agrees to receive all kinds of
pop-up ads in their web browser and permit BitTorrentBooster to change
the default search engine. As if that’s not enough, it will also turn
all their users into their very own marketing machine.
“The Software may add to all computers’ outgoing and incoming
emails, to forums and social networks posting, regardless of local or
online service, one to Two text lines which carry advertisement
information and a link to the advertiser,” the EULA reads.
This basically means that you allow the software vendors to add
adverts to your outgoing and incoming emails, and even grant them the
right to use your social networking accounts to post ads for them.
According to the threat blog
the software does indeed interact with Myspace’s “add comment” feature,
and they’ve also confirmed that it attaches adverts to your outgoing
email messages.
Needless to say the BitTorrentBooster people, who also host the wonderful “Smileys Toolbar”
are not really concerned with making your downloads faster. They are
spamming The Pirate Bay and other sites for only one reason - to make
as much money as possible.
SOURCE : TorrentFreak
