Thursday, January 20, 2011

Downloading a “Movie” or a “Microbe”?




With the popularity of portable electronic devices, computers, and internet, nobody wants to carry around a bulky pack of CD's or DVD’s anymore.  There are several file sharing programs out on the internet that allow you to download movies and various other kind of stuff free of cost. But here a question arises as to why these providers are uploading these media for free? A survey by Anti Hacking Anticipation Society produces some facts that these movies contain hidden viruses and Trojans that get installed on your system when you try to open/play them and then spy on you or harm you in other ways. These Microbes download other malicious applications at the backend that make a computer no more useful for his master. The only preferred solution thereafter is just to compromise with these malice or format the entire system to get rid of them.

How these Microbes work?

Traditionally, most of the internet users download movies and movies using file sharing portals but now scenario is changed there are now n number of options for techno savvies to get a newly released movie. Without knowing the fact that nothing is free in world, these people download movies from torrents. Where, providers have self interest in sharing the files. They bind malicious scripts with movies such that while playing such movie, automatically a Microbe gets executed. These microbes keep a watch on your surfing habits, maintain a log of websites visited and email addresses typed and send you bulk spam emails. Even these logs are automatically forwarded to interested people who sell this information further to spammers.
Next time when you download and play a movie in a player (eg. VLC) you might see a error message “trying to play hd file aborting redirecting to site”, please don’t continue with that movie, as this error message signifies that it is taking you to an another host not even if it asks you to download “full codec player” to play the movie. 



 There Microbes and viruses have been considered to be a threat since the advent of the PC. The situation is critical now because 9 out of every 10 pc's connected via the internet is infected with Microbes and viruses.  

1 comment:

  1. Whats with the terminology "microbe"; and one can get genuine torrents for movies. And if the movie plays alright, then there is nothing malicious going on in the background.

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