Excited about the Final Season of Game of Thrones? Be Careful Where You Watch It!

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Here is how you can get infected with malware

All Game of Thrones fans know it by now – the long-awaited final season is starting on Sunday, April 14th. While you may be overly excited to watch it, you may also be tempted to stream it online for free or resort to torrent websites and download it illegally.

By turning to these resources you are not only breaking copyright laws but possibly your computer as well.

According to the anti-malware researcher Muso, almost 190 billion visits were made to illegal piracy websites in 2018. Nearly half of these people visited the websites in search for television shows, and almost one in five visitors were looking for the latest movie.

Two years ago, before Season 7 of Game of Thrones was released, over 10 million Americans were planning to watch it illegally, and it would be safe to assume the numbers would look equally shocking this year.

Winter is coming, but so is malware

We decided to take a look at what domains our users have tried to access in the past two weeks, to see what type of content Thor Foresight blocked. We investigated all the domains containing keywords related to TV and videos in general.

Below you can see the keywords we looked at. The percentages were calculated out of the total number of TV and video-related keywords.

According to another recent report, the number of users who ran into TV shows-related malware in 2018 is one-third less than in 2017. But the rest of the findings don’t fall on the bright side at all. Interestingly enough, although there was a one-year gap between Season 7 and Season 8, Game of Thrones was the top target for malware in 2018.

This show alone was accounted for 17% of all the infected pirated content in 2018, with almost 21,000 users attacked.

Where did malicious actors hide the largest number of infected files? Obviously, in the first and last episodes of each season of Game of Thrones, since you are most likely not to miss these.

The same research showed Trojan was the most frequent malware type.

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