HBO also noticed this bonus episode through its anti-piracy partner Marketly and took action in response. A takedown notice posted in the Lumen Database shows that the company asked Google to remove an “infringing” link to the non-existent release earlier this week.
They’re claiming to own the copyright to the Trojan horse?
I think they’re issuing a take down notice for using the name and posing as them.
“Takedown notice” has legal meaning, it’s not some random cease-and-desist letter that you can draft for anything you want and that has no legal weight other than that it might be scary.
Mindlessly downloading an episode that doesn’t get a mention on the wiki page is amateur hour.
The torrent was titled as .mkv (normal and expected) but the actual file was .lnk (not normal)… so you would have had to open a weird random .lnk file to activate the trojan?
Windows hides extensions by default.
Unhiding extensions is one of the first things I do when setting up windows, but it will still hide the .lnk extension on shortcuts, so it’s still a vector for phishing attacks (specifically, tricking the user to do something that runs malicious code).
Experienced pirates will get intonthe habit of taking precautions against malware attacks and will distrust downloads until they are sufficiently vetted,
I wonder if an automated setup would play it without caring about the extension. If someone had something like Sonarr dropping episodes on a Plex drive, for example.
The comments from obvious teenagers on 1337x on pretty much every torrent suggests that a lot of people do this
Basic computer usage skill level does seem to be in decline, doesn’t it lol.
I believe the torrent included both an .mkv and a malicious .lnk file.
.lnk files are dangerous because they can evade detection and automatically open other files or executable on a computer; AFAIK you would not have had to open the .lnk file yourself.
Suspect Sonarr users didn’t have any issues, as it wouldn’t have gone looking for an episode 9.
Indeed, it’s only showing 8.
This isn’t exactly special. People have been putting viruses into torrents forever.
You should assume anything you download from the internet has a virus!
What? Are you telling me that “baby one more time.mp3.exe” I got off of Napster isn’t actually reliable? Gasp!
Well, the good news is that it wasn’t actually another episode.
