On the dangers of popular television series

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On the dangers of popular television series

Despite an increasing number of people preferring to stream their TV shows and generally opting for legally obtained content, pirates and BitTorrent sites hold their ground. And because, from a legal standpoint, torrent sites are in a gray-fading-into-black area, they have been a playground of choice for cybercriminals disguising their malicious files as useful stuff.

The serial threat

The easiest to deceive among torrent site users are those looking to download software: Slip in a different executable and the user’s hooked. However, scammers are interested in anything that is popular with users, and television series might be the hottest thing these days, so these, too, are being used as disguise for all kinds of malware. So, we decided to analyze what dangers a wish to download a popular TV show from a torrent site may bring upon you.

We used IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes ratings to select 31 television series and downloaded anonymized statistics on them from our KSN cloud service to find out what types of malware users who dealt with the shows have encountered.

Guessing what show would prove the most popular among scammers was easy: It’s Game of Thrones. According to our statistics, Game of Thrones–related malware species that attacked users in 2018 numbered almost 10,000 — or 9,986 to be exact. These malicious programs attempted to infect the users’ machines more than 120,000 times. That is just the year 2018, and the statistics are limited to users of our solutions, so the total number of attacks worldwide should be far larger.

Most times, malware tries to pass as the first or the final episode. The very first episode of the first season of Game of Thrones, “Winter is Coming,” is the absolute leader in the number of attacks.

The runner-up among TV shows, both in terms of users attacked and the number of attacks, is The Walking Dead. These two lead by a significant margin: Arrow, in third place overall, accounted for about two-thirds the number of users attacked, and in terms of the number of attacks it was used for represents less than one-third.

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