I’m seeing thepiratebay org is discouraged because it has lots of viruses due to lack of moderation. I was wondering how could an mp4 or an mkv etc. could be harmful? Are people talking about executable stuff?
It has long stopped being useful for a long, long time. It is just but a symbol of piracy. It hasn’t even had it’s original creators for close to 10 years now? Maybe longer.
It’s discouraged because it has lost it’s place as the place to go to for pirated material. All you’ll find is nothing but people slipping in malware on things you want.
yes, it’s mostly things like games or software
though, I have seen more & more reports of people finding malicious disguised LNK files in their downloads and torrents, which will run some arbitrary command if you open that: Windows does not ever show the LNK extension, so a file could be named “<whatever>.mkv.lnk”, and you would only know if you checked the “file type” column in Explorer (which would read “Shortcut” instead of something like “Matryoshka file”), or when you see the cmd.exe window flicker open and close.
bonus edit: LNK is the native file extension that Windows uses to link app shortcuts, such as the shortcuts on your desktop.
Aah okay, thanks. Yeah, I’m on Linux already and only ever view files from a client that only shows media files. I’ve found some more recommended alternatives and will use them going forward. I was just looking to see if I should delete the stuff I had from tpb but doesn’t seem necessary.
Link files will show the .lnk extension on Linux and it should be obvious from the icon that it’s not a video file. If you have wine installed, then double clicking one will run it and malware can still cause problems when run in wine.
If your torrent client has the option to run a script or command when a download completes, you could have it delete all .lnk files in the download directory. Something like find /path/to/my/download/directory -type f -iname "*.lnk" -delete would work.
I have literally never downloaded pirated software since OS 9 went away and OS X became a thing. Open up your task manager and look at how many processes there are (Window, Mac or Linux) and ask yourself if you’re going to notice the one extra process that is out of place.
As for files with extra extensions, this is why you should always set Explorer/Finder/whatever to show all file extensions the very first thing, regardless of what OS you’re running too.
TPB is fine if you’re cautious and just download video/audio. I’m in a bunch of private trackers but still use it occasionally since it can have old and obscure stuff occasionally since the site is so old.
Ideally, a .mp4, or any other non-executable file format, would not be able to execute rogue code on your computer, but the programs you use to open the files with might have security flaws which allow rogue code execution if done right.
You might have a hypothetical file, which might not be dangerous if opened with VLC, but which exploits a flaw in, say, Windows Media Player version x.y.z to execute a payload.
Sorry, for not including any examples, I’m currently not at the PC.
I think the piratebay is fine. I haven’t seen anything mal on piratebay in years, and I think the last mal download I saw then was a basic the video itself is the text “go to http://malware.ru/payload/virus to download the codec for this totally legit file” not like, state actor polymorphic virus shit. For an mkv/mp4 itself to actually do anything, it would need to memory overflow the player (which could be mitigated in several ways) and that’s a heavy engineering lift to use to do much on a modern OS (and would be specific to one OS/version/hardware situation). A criminal organization or state actor bothering to develop something like that isn’t going to put it on piratebay to be downloaded by 10000 randos globally, they’d put it on the public web, or target it to specific high value targets.
It’s usually fine, but I download new TV shows automatically and I got a .exe instead of the new Frasier. I don’t think I’ll be downloading an actual .exe from TPB in the future lol
