Pirated Windows 7 Smart to Steal?
It doesn’t take long for software to appear on the torrents ready for downloading. As people are ready to move away from Vista to something new and better without going to the Mac side – downloads of Microsoft Windows 7 has skyrocketed. Although beta version were available to download, when the release candidate was leaked a lot of people jumped on BitTorrent to get themselves a copy. Altough, the person who leaked this copy to the public had more to share than just the copy of windows 7.
According to a eWeek article the pirate also included their own software with this package:
According to researchers at Damballa, attackers hid a Trojan inside of pirated copies of the operating system and began circulating them on BitTorrent sites. Damballa reported that it shut down the botnet’s command and control server May 10, but by that time infection rates had risen as high as 552 users per hour.
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In the case of Windows 7 RC, pirated copies were leaked on BitTorrent sites with a Trojan horse that, once downloaded, attempts to install a bundle of other malware on the infected machine. Blocking infections is tricky, as many anti-virus tools do not yet support Windows 7 and the operating system is infected before the tools can even be installed, according to Damballa.
To have preinfected software in pirated software is not new, but having it on the OS installation is something I haven’t heard of before. Antivirus is not usually the first thing people install when trying out a new operating system, especially when Windows 7 is not very antivirus software friendly currently.
So, for those that are looking for that cheap (free) software online – remember you get what you pay for. =) How about just using the public beta directly from Microsoft?